It mostly hurts people in countries with weak purchasing power. DS was the main game in down for them.

Personally, I don't think we've seen the total end of dirt cheap LLMs, it's just a frontier lab doesn't want to be in business of serving half the world.

It seems frontier labs want to sell Ferraris at Ferrari prices, when the mass market is for Hondas.

You certainly don't need Fable to code up a basic web app, any more than you need a Ferrari to go grocery shopping.

There's a lot more competition over smaller models. Ferraris are frontier labs' main differentiating point when Hondas are increasingly open source and commoditized.

Thank you for bringing that up, such a rarity for this place to remember the other 80% of the world.

As someone from just such a country, DeepSeek 0731 was the first time I seriously started using an LLM for coding. All previous attempts were useless or ridiculously expensive.

Can't say the old prices felt "free", but it was affordable if you're careful with your cache hit rate.

The new pricing probably pushed it into the unaffordable territory for tasks where you can do without it. Probably will try opencode go if they don't also follow suite, or will have to go back to wetware.

you should be using opencode go - you get 6x the tokens for the same price. They also have free models. Kilocode and others also offer free models.

opencode go is slowly losing its value. Most of the $60 for $10 have become $15 for $10. In addition to deepseek's api pricing going up 2x today.

That's not the way math works...

its precisely the way math works...