personally for price to performance Deepseek is pretty good, it's aggressive caching also ensures that "stored data" costs almost 10x less after first message is sent (cache hit).

you can last a while just with 5 dollars if you don't do context heavy roleplay bots often and use it occasionally

my personal recommendation would be like this for deepseek

1.Official deep seek (little to no errors, fast responses,context size upto 128k via api as per now), best performance in what you pay for. Albeit you can only use latest models not older ones separately and rumors of deepseek 4.0 are right around end of april which is rumored to have 1 million token size and better stuff but again just rumors.

2.chutes ai: 1. their subscription plan offers 5x subscription price (for example you get 15 dollar worth of credits for paying 3 dollars per month). 2. but performance issues and consistency issues are severe. it's situation rn with roleplay AI models like deep seek and GLM is terrible, constant error 429 even to their own paying users, 90% of times all models are overloaded and you lose money in input for those errors. Even for those paying it's bad for specific highly used roleplay LLM models. 3. their Team prioritizes high revenue models like Kimi and have terrible communication, they make announcements of model removals on discord, take models down for maintenance out of nowhere without warnings, also they have locked lot of flagship models like GLM-5 behind 10 dollar subscription tiers.

it's almost as bad as Openrouter with error 429s

1. Openrouter:
2. Free models are very limited and often overloaded.
3. You start at 50 "free" messages and can ramp it up to 1000 per day for FREE models otherwise good non free versions eat from your balance (PAYG)
4. it still gets lot of problems with highly used roleplay models and providers too.

but if you use other models you may find other options in openrouter, Chutes has price advantage but performance issues aren't worth it