A month of heavy DeepSeek 4.1 Flash use: near-frontier quality, orders cheaper
victormustar · x · 2026-10-09
A developer's month-long deep dive on DeepSeek 4.1 Flash across a dozen projects: it feels indistinguishable from frontier models like Opus in daily use, yet costs orders of magnitude less—roughly $10/month via OpenCode Go, rarely exceeding $1 per session, with trivial tasks dropping from $1 to $0.003. His thesis: "good enough" changes how you work, unattended and exploratory tasks are now free to spam, and China's distilled models trail frontier labs by only a month or two—frontier labs should be worried.
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