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- Hacker News
- Thank you for old vs new comparisonby NullifyNAN
- Well I could have done without the improvement if it meant keeping the prices low, might have to find a better model for cheap inferenceby alxcls
- DeekSeek did a strategic b2c mistake. It is always easier to start with higher prices and give discounts than go opposite way (=raise).
But people get used to higher prices. Or they churn out.
For hobby projects there can be local or free models. There are also some caching techniques.
by sixtyj - Yeah, they onboarded A LOT of folks with that original pricing and quality. It was "good enough" for most use-cases, like many, I work in existing code-bases and do a lot of "multi-file" edits, that aren't hard to do technically, just take a lot of time and must be done precisely enough. For that, it was perfect.
I wonder how many people will stay, there's still a huge void in alternatives on that original pricing.
by mittermayr - DeepSeek was already pretty cheap compared to OpenAI and else, but now with peak pricing, it's not as straightforward. GPT-4o mini is $0.15/$0.60 per 1M tokens, while DeepSeek V4 Flash off-peak is $0.22/$0.66. So still cheaper, but the gap is narrowing. But is it worth it for the end user?..
- I guess it’s not unexpected per se, but the peak hours are solidly Chinese daytime work hours with an extended lunch break, and hitting a bit of Europe’s morning. But no American peak hours, unless you count after-work hobby coding (6-9 pm Pacific?) which tells you indirectly a bit that American adoption is not a major driver of revenue for them. Or that the after-work ‘hobbyist’ is the main audience, which is also plausible.