A week of Claude Code tokens: $1,965 on Opus 5.5 vs $44 on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
Pricing 7 days of real Claude Code logs (5.1B tokens) per model gives $1,965 for Opus 5.5, $983 for Sonnet 5.5, $620 for Gemini 4 Argon, $74 for Haiku 5.5 and $44 for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, about 45x cheaper, though the author concedes quality differs.
My week of Claude Code at API prices: $1,965. The exact same tokens on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: $44. I took 7 days of my real Claude Code logs (5.1B tokens) and priced them per model: → Opus 5.5: $1,965 → Sonnet 5.5: $983 → Gemini 4 Argon: $620 → Haiku 5.5: $74 → DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: $44 45× cheaper. And half of the Opus bill is just re-reading cached chat history. Not the same quality, so I won't switch everything. But for the boring 80%? Hard to justify Opus. Would you swap your daily driver for 45× cheaper? 👇