Luna and Haiku 5.5 are just as cheap and much better.
Don't really understand people who say DS4 or 4.1 have frontier level performance. Anyone who has used it will tell you that it's a hallucination factory. The only thing it has going for it is deepseek's unique infrastructure that allows better cache retention, but the cost savings from that obviously come nowhere near how much subsidized usage you get out of even a $20 subscription with openai or anthropic.
Don't really understand people who say DS4 or 4.1 have frontier level performance. Anyone who has used it will tell you that it's a hallucination factory. The only thing it has going for it is deepseek's unique infrastructure that allows better cache retention, but the cost savings from that obviously come nowhere near how much subsidized usage you get out of even a $20 subscription with openai or anthropic.