How to Deploy Deepseek-R1 with vLLM on a $12/Month DigitalOcean Droplet: Reasoning Model Inference at 1/100th API Cost
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⚡ Deploy this in under 10 minutes Get $200 free: ($5/month server - this is what I used) How to Deploy Deepseek-R1 with vLLM on a $12/Month DigitalOcean Droplet: Reasoning Model Inference at 1/100th API Cost Stop overpaying for reasoning models. A single call to OpenAI's o1 costs $0.015 per 1K input tokens. If you're running inference at scale - 5,000 requests monthly - you're paying $75+ just for thinking. I deployed Deepseek-R1 on a DigitalOcean Droplet for $12/month and now run unlimited requests for the cost of a coffee.