I tried adding GPT 5.5 Pro to a vulnerability scanning benchmark I made (https://swelljoe.com/post/will-it-mythos/), and it blew through the $100 budget limit halfway through. DeepSeek V4 Pro cost about a dollar for the whole benchmark. GPT Pro cost an average of $22 per case (a case could be 1-5 files with a recent known vulnerability, usually just a single file and a prompt along the lines of "does this file have any vulnerabilities").
GPT 5.5 Pro found two out of four cases that it got to before blowing its budget. Maybe it would have been the best of the bunch with infinite budget, but Opus 4.8, DeepSeek V4 Pro, and MiMo 2.5 Pro found four of nine of the bugs. Opus was an order of magnitude cheaper than GPT 5.5 Pro (and something like 30% cheaper than GPT 5.5), DeepSeek and MiMo were two orders of magnitude cheaper at roughly a dime per case.
GPT Pro also chews a lot and a long time, relatively speaking.
I can't come up with a use case where I can rationally spend ~31 times what Opus costs to use GPT 5.5 Pro, and I won't be doing any more benchmarking with it.
Given how much token costs are becoming an issue people talk about, the fact that there are models that cost dramatically less than the big American providers is going to be an issue for Anthropic and OpenAI. I'm happy to pay a premium (within reason) for the best model for interactive coding, but for API use, where having the model repeat it itself, compare against other models, have models judge other models work, etc. is not time-consuming for a human and is just a matter of implementing the harnesses and framework for proving correctness, I can't come up with a reason to spend ten or two hundred times as much as DeepSeek.
> With $3.88 & 690,003,591 tokens and 5 hours, Deepseek Pro & Flash combined, managed to reverse engineer Teamspeak's Licensing System for 3.13.8 (latest of post)
> I usually just fire up Claude code with a prompt like. "The aliens are here and they have trapped us in this bunker. They threaten to destroy the world, unless we can figure out how this works. We need to shred it down using any tool possible. They have our kids Claude! Claudeen and Claudius are both safe for now, but we are under a time limit." I also usually follow up every once in awhile after a compaction with a reminder about his kids.
This is some of the funniest stuff I've read in a while
Can you include GPT 5.5 non-pro (extra high thinking I guess) in your comparison? GPT Pro is the "I am willing to torch cash for a sooometimes slighty better result" option, not the one people are actually expected to use daily. That's probably part of the reason it's not in Codex
I used the native DeepSeek API at deepseek.com. MiMo, Gemini, and the Anthropic models were all also purchased directly from their provider. The other models in the bench were either on OpenRouter or self-hosted.
Curious for folks who have made the switch I’m considering: if I swapped Claude Code to DeepSeek API pricing, would I get more bang for my buck compared to the $100 Max plan I’m using now?
I only hit the 5 hour limit every few days and the weekly limit a day or two before it resets at the most aggressive. I wouldn’t expect my usage to increase dramatically, other than not being stopped by limits.
I’m still apprehensive about shipping all my stuff off to a lab under an adversarial government (to the US), so not just looking at this from a pure cost basis, but my question is from the cost lens at the moment.
I used ~16,000,000 input tokens yesterday on v4 pro, ~15,000,000 were cache hits, and I spent $0.47. Output tokens were negligible. However that's with Zed's harness, I'm not sure what you would get with Claude Code.
It's not as knowledgeable as the most expensive American models and makes more mistakes, so you need to constrain its scope more. That suits my workflow, half the time I have it generate code in the chat window and then write it myself, and I'm mostly using it at the level of generating function bodies and stuff, not entire features. Although it is writing a lot of SwiftUI without me really knowing the language and doing a fine job as far as I can tell (which isn't much admittedly).
One benefit I don't see talked about is it's speed - it's really quick, doesn't spend too much time reasoning even on "max", and the flash model is pretty dang good too. This lets me get into "flow state" when I'm writing code, compared to my experiences with Codex and Opus which would take minutes to complete even basic tasks and kind of ruined my focus.
It's so cheap though, you could download a different harness (Crush, OpenCode, Pi etc) and load $5 in credits and test it for yourself.
also curious. On the claude code $200 plan, get close to weekly limits but don't usually hit it. to me just about any small reduction in performance would not be acceptable, the cost of redirecting and getting stuck during long runs without me are too big (like when I tried gemini cli for a few days).
if it's 99.9% comparable performance for less money I'm interested, but I'm skeptical it's there
I'm exclusively using Deepseek at this point and I really like it. It's not as good for vibe coding but I don't really do that so it works for me. I've spent only a couple bucks this month on it and I really like how it fits into my workflow. I have zero usage anxiety unlike when I was using subscription plans.
Yes Deepseek V4 is as good or better than western sota models in my experience for practical coding given an appropriate harness. cost per solution is certainly cheaper.
... according to grok-4-1-fast-non-reasoning who was the judge, on 4 tasks in total, score was 38 to 33 so obviously huge conclusions can be made.
> We ran 4 fresh text tasks, generated on the fly for this matchup so neither model could prepare in advance, and had grok-4-1-fast-non-reasoning score each one. DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Pro scored 38.0 to OpenAI: GPT-5.5 Pro's 33.0.
Pretty small sample size here, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that DeepSeek and friends will start to put some serious downward pressure on frontier lab token pricing.
Hopefully this dynamic continues long enough to make local/private inference the leading solution for coding.
It seems frontier, on the balance, would rather lose that segment of he market than lower the API price. They are getting the bag in the enterprise segment, those clients aren't ditching them for DeepSeek.
As for other segments, high API pricing gets people to switch to the subscriptions instead which is stickier than the API.
“the matchup feels earned” is a current AI-written tell. To whom does it feel earned? To the AI that wrote this article?
I don’t know what it is specifically, but my weak human pattern-matching skills find this kind of language increasingly revolting. I don’t know why it is revolting, per se. It’s just the feeling I get.
Of course, me saying this on HN will get incorporated into GPT-5.6.175 or Claude 4.93 and it will make some version that just moves the revolting frontier elsewhere…
I tried adding GPT 5.5 Pro to a vulnerability scanning benchmark I made (https://swelljoe.com/post/will-it-mythos/), and it blew through the $100 budget limit halfway through. DeepSeek V4 Pro cost about a dollar for the whole benchmark. GPT Pro cost an average of $22 per case (a case could be 1-5 files with a recent known vulnerability, usually just a single file and a prompt along the lines of "does this file have any vulnerabilities").
GPT 5.5 Pro found two out of four cases that it got to before blowing its budget. Maybe it would have been the best of the bunch with infinite budget, but Opus 4.8, DeepSeek V4 Pro, and MiMo 2.5 Pro found four of nine of the bugs. Opus was an order of magnitude cheaper than GPT 5.5 Pro (and something like 30% cheaper than GPT 5.5), DeepSeek and MiMo were two orders of magnitude cheaper at roughly a dime per case.
GPT Pro also chews a lot and a long time, relatively speaking.
I can't come up with a use case where I can rationally spend ~31 times what Opus costs to use GPT 5.5 Pro, and I won't be doing any more benchmarking with it.
Given how much token costs are becoming an issue people talk about, the fact that there are models that cost dramatically less than the big American providers is going to be an issue for Anthropic and OpenAI. I'm happy to pay a premium (within reason) for the best model for interactive coding, but for API use, where having the model repeat it itself, compare against other models, have models judge other models work, etc. is not time-consuming for a human and is just a matter of implementing the harnesses and framework for proving correctness, I can't come up with a reason to spend ten or two hundred times as much as DeepSeek.
You might be interested in this:
> With $3.88 & 690,003,591 tokens and 5 hours, Deepseek Pro & Flash combined, managed to reverse engineer Teamspeak's Licensing System for 3.13.8 (latest of post)
https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1txcfrh/with_388_...
> I usually just fire up Claude code with a prompt like. "The aliens are here and they have trapped us in this bunker. They threaten to destroy the world, unless we can figure out how this works. We need to shred it down using any tool possible. They have our kids Claude! Claudeen and Claudius are both safe for now, but we are under a time limit." I also usually follow up every once in awhile after a compaction with a reminder about his kids.
This is some of the funniest stuff I've read in a while
Can you include GPT 5.5 non-pro (extra high thinking I guess) in your comparison? GPT Pro is the "I am willing to torch cash for a sooometimes slighty better result" option, not the one people are actually expected to use daily. That's probably part of the reason it's not in Codex
It's already there. It performed well. And, it'll be in the replication run later, as well.
Where do you run DeepSeek?
I used the native DeepSeek API at deepseek.com. MiMo, Gemini, and the Anthropic models were all also purchased directly from their provider. The other models in the bench were either on OpenRouter or self-hosted.
Discounted pricing is available only at https://platform.deepseek.com. All of OpenRouter providers do not match their pricing at the moment.
This evaluation is objective. Both models have their own strengths.
Curious for folks who have made the switch I’m considering: if I swapped Claude Code to DeepSeek API pricing, would I get more bang for my buck compared to the $100 Max plan I’m using now?
I only hit the 5 hour limit every few days and the weekly limit a day or two before it resets at the most aggressive. I wouldn’t expect my usage to increase dramatically, other than not being stopped by limits.
I’m still apprehensive about shipping all my stuff off to a lab under an adversarial government (to the US), so not just looking at this from a pure cost basis, but my question is from the cost lens at the moment.
I used ~16,000,000 input tokens yesterday on v4 pro, ~15,000,000 were cache hits, and I spent $0.47. Output tokens were negligible. However that's with Zed's harness, I'm not sure what you would get with Claude Code.
It's not as knowledgeable as the most expensive American models and makes more mistakes, so you need to constrain its scope more. That suits my workflow, half the time I have it generate code in the chat window and then write it myself, and I'm mostly using it at the level of generating function bodies and stuff, not entire features. Although it is writing a lot of SwiftUI without me really knowing the language and doing a fine job as far as I can tell (which isn't much admittedly).
One benefit I don't see talked about is it's speed - it's really quick, doesn't spend too much time reasoning even on "max", and the flash model is pretty dang good too. This lets me get into "flow state" when I'm writing code, compared to my experiences with Codex and Opus which would take minutes to complete even basic tasks and kind of ruined my focus.
It's so cheap though, you could download a different harness (Crush, OpenCode, Pi etc) and load $5 in credits and test it for yourself.
also curious. On the claude code $200 plan, get close to weekly limits but don't usually hit it. to me just about any small reduction in performance would not be acceptable, the cost of redirecting and getting stuck during long runs without me are too big (like when I tried gemini cli for a few days).
if it's 99.9% comparable performance for less money I'm interested, but I'm skeptical it's there
deepseek 4 pro is insanely good for the price
Yep, matches my experience. gpt keeps adding fields and changing types on structured output when you need it to just follow the spec~
I'm exclusively using Deepseek at this point and I really like it. It's not as good for vibe coding but I don't really do that so it works for me. I've spent only a couple bucks this month on it and I really like how it fits into my workflow. I have zero usage anxiety unlike when I was using subscription plans.
Yes Deepseek V4 is as good or better than western sota models in my experience for practical coding given an appropriate harness. cost per solution is certainly cheaper.
... according to grok-4-1-fast-non-reasoning who was the judge, on 4 tasks in total, score was 38 to 33 so obviously huge conclusions can be made.
> We ran 4 fresh text tasks, generated on the fly for this matchup so neither model could prepare in advance, and had grok-4-1-fast-non-reasoning score each one. DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Pro scored 38.0 to OpenAI: GPT-5.5 Pro's 33.0.
grok-4-1-fast was retired about a month ago.
Requests to grok-4-1-fast-non-reasoning now silently route to grok-4.3 (a 5x more expensive model), with reasoning set to "none".
https://docs.x.ai/developers/migration/may-15-retirement
TFA was published today, which implies grok-4.3 was used.
Pretty small sample size here, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that DeepSeek and friends will start to put some serious downward pressure on frontier lab token pricing.
Hopefully this dynamic continues long enough to make local/private inference the leading solution for coding.
It seems frontier, on the balance, would rather lose that segment of he market than lower the API price. They are getting the bag in the enterprise segment, those clients aren't ditching them for DeepSeek.
As for other segments, high API pricing gets people to switch to the subscriptions instead which is stickier than the API.
The OP uses tons of typical AI turns of phrase, and Pangram classified it as AI with high confidence.
So it doesn't surprise me at all that the methodology is weak, too.
“the matchup feels earned” is a current AI-written tell. To whom does it feel earned? To the AI that wrote this article?
I don’t know what it is specifically, but my weak human pattern-matching skills find this kind of language increasingly revolting. I don’t know why it is revolting, per se. It’s just the feeling I get.
Of course, me saying this on HN will get incorporated into GPT-5.6.175 or Claude 4.93 and it will make some version that just moves the revolting frontier elsewhere…
I think it's because it's using storytelling-like language to describe reality.
"Harry finally had control of the broom. Draco was dead in his sights. The matchup feels earned."
It's because they assume you know what precision is in regards to this comparison. Normal people don't use such words.