DeepSeek V4-Flash: A Solid GPT-4 Alternative at 60% Less Cost

I've been testing DeepSeek V4-Flash as an alternative to GPT-4 for the past few weeks, and here are my honest thoughts. Performance: For coding tasks (debugging, code generation, refactoring), it's very close to GPT-4. For complex reasoning chains, it holds up well. Where it falls short is creative writing and nuanced instructions - but for a developer-focused API, that's usually not a dealbreaker. Pricing comparison (per 1M tokens): GPT-4o: $2.50 / $10.00 DeepSeek V4-Flash via Cheap AI API: $1.00 / $6.00 That's roughly 60% less. The catch: It's not OpenAI.