Can you elaborate on DeepSeek (deepseek-v4-flash, i assume?). What does your typical usage pattern look like and what is your weekly/monthly spend?

I gave it a try for a few days (pi + openrouter + deepseek-v4-flash via deepinfra) and ended up paying ~$18 for rather light usage. Yes it's still cheap, yes it's fast, but i feel i would still get a better deal with a Claude subscription plan.

DeepSeek without OpenRouter is wayyyy cheaper

Is it? OpenRouter shows DeepInfra being cheaper than DeepSeek directly

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-20260731#pr...

I agree with parent. OpenRouter might be cheaper list-price, but i have been using 10$ on DS platform since April/May, still have 2$ left. Using OpenRouter i depleted the same dollar-amount in a 1-2 weeks with same usage pattern. No idea why.

What does your usage look like?

DeepInfra's Cache Read is 6.5 times more expensive than DeepSeek.

And in many scenarios, cache hits are 99% of tokens, so the price difference in caching really adds up quickly.

Interesting. My anecdotal experience is that it is.

Going directly though DeepSeek's API and hitting all day long with light/medium tasks I'm at $5/month. That's with pretty vanilla ohmypi.

I will refuse to read such messages or documents. At the very minimum, i want a human-written TLDR-style summary to ensure the sender has read their own slop.

Yep. I'm categorically ignoring messages and PRs that are obviously AI written.

>Europe due to its lack of European competitors, has no current similar protectionist incentives [...] The genie is out of the bottle in the West already.

I agree, but you are underestimating EU regulatory incompetence

Amen. If i see a 5000 line README i am closing the tab.

I have in my CLAUDE/AGENTS.md to be concise with both chat output and documentation.

Yet still I get walls of text often. It's so fatiguing.

Root agents.md should be human authored. Even if you copy and paste into it. That's your only lasting thread into having any intuition on the behavior that will result

>bug reports sit on their "feedback forum" for months

This, plus in my experience, the forum is the only way to get things resolved.

Bug reports to the account managers / architects (Enterprise contract) is not forwarded to the appropriate channels and never get addressed.

Blocking known bot identifiers via robots.txt does nothing by the way. Too many labs are running sneaky crawlers that do not respect robots.txt. You will need to take extreme measures: blocking basically all datacenter IP ranges, VPN IPs, aggressive rate limiting, etc.

Blocking LLM crawlers has become the number one use case for our IP database customers at https://focsec.com/

Even very basic browser fingerprinting will still identify you. The IP address is just one of many data points.

The point isn’t to hide yourself from the destination.

It’s to hide along the journey there.

Fingerprinting is usually insufficient for law enforcement.

Jup, if you are using any mainstream VPN provider (the ones shilled on every tech YouTube channel) or anything that results in a datacenter IP, it is trivial to discover and block.

The detection tech has been around forever: https://focsec.com/

Add to that that half of these companies are registered in obscure offshore locations where it is practically impossible to even find out who are the ultimate owners.

To be fair: all hosting providers deal with A LOT of abuse happening on their systems. Malware being hosted, people abusing trial periods ands free plans etc.

No sure if requiring a ID upfront is the perfect solution (if i recall, i never had to provide a ID on my private or business Hetzner accounts) but it isn't just there to annoy you.