DeepSeek through their own API has saved me tons of tokens honestly. Even though it is not as smart as Kimi or Claude, their level of entry is very low with a top up of 2$ and Pay as you go compared to the subscription of Claude or 20$ top up of Kimi
For personal use I’m considering using the frontier models from openai or anthropic to create a plan with research and brainstorming etc with enough details for cheap models to be able to follow (glm, deepseek etc) - with openrouter - will monitor how cheap and effective that turns out to be.
You should try out the cheaper models first. I find Deepseek v4 models pretty comparable to sonnet 4.6 but at a fraction of the cost. You might find you just don't need to use the American models at all.
For my case Openrouter breaks Deepseek caching and charges me multiple times over what I pay for Deepseek's API, with 2$ I was able to get around 120M tokens from deepseek easily when Openrouter could only barely do 250k
Seconding the recommendation to use Deepseek directly via the API. I've burnt 287 million tokens in the last couple of days, costing me a whopping $5.77
USD.
