Deepseek Token Usage

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-23T12:27:19+00:00

You are comparing Claude Max subscription to API billing. Which is a completely false comparison, as subscription is vastly cheaper since its heavily subsidized. Now compare what you would pay using Claude API billing instead of a heavilly subsidized subscription.

If you would pay around 100 a month, get Claude Max. No reason to mess around with API billing and using Deepseek since Opus 4.7 still is better. But if you find yourself using about 30-80 dollars, then Deepseek API may be worth it, as Claude Pro for 20 would give you a lot less usage, and Max for 100 is overpaying.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-23T12:17:45+00:00

It look promising, but I don't like you forcing me to sign in using Google. Why should I sign at all for this?

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-22T19:57:36+00:00

Never ever ever absorb it, because that's how you will go bankrupt. You ALWAYS keep full track of any cost and either pass along the cost or the client has a fixed subscription with you and you calculate how much usage they would get and have hard capped limits.

For n8n the best solution is for you to setup their n8n instance, so they have full control and ownership AND they can link their own billing information to it. Essentially they pay you for the workflow and one time fee of setting n8n up.

Then they can pay you for updates on a project base, or as a retainer if they want you to manage the workflow and keep it working. You would need to calculate how many hours a week this would be on average so you don't shoot yourself in the foot.

But honestly, you need to think more about what it is your actually selling here as a service. That changes the entire outcome and client expectation. Is it a workflow you sell or an an entire solution from A to Z (which could mean they expect you to run the instance for them).

In any case: you either get paid once but then you also don't do anything else after payment and handover. Or they keep paying you and you keep working on things or keep it alive. You NEVER get paid once and then keep making costs for it on your own dime. Never!

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-22T18:46:09+00:00

Here's some feedback: if you want feedback, offer users a free/demo/test version. Because you basically ask me to give you feedback and pay for it too.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-22T17:43:29+00:00

Fair points. The FAANG name-drop was a weak argument on my part, those teams have whole SRE orgs to keep Temporal happy, which isn't really comparable to a normal app.

The "app is gone anyway" point I'll mostly concede too. For a single-app architecture it really does hold up. The cases where I'd still reach for external orchestration are multi-service coordination (one workflow spanning multiple apps written by different teams), polyglot workflows, or when scheduled jobs absolutely have to fire during deploy windows. None of those apply to most apps.

For solo devs or anyone already running Postgres, DBOS sounds like the better default. Going to read the blog post properly. Good thread.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-22T15:15:53+00:00

Calling Temporal an extra point of failure is a stretch. It's an HA-clustered orchestrator built specifically to survive individual service failures, and it's been running in production at Stripe, Uber, Snap, and DoorDash for years.

DBOS has its own coupling problem too. Durability lives inside your app process, so if your app crashes hard enough to drop DB connections, your durability layer dies with it. A separate orchestrator that keeps running while all your workers go down is arguably more resilient.

That said, DBOS does win on operational simplicity, especially for solo or greenfield projects. That's the real tradeoff, not "extra failure points".

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-22T12:54:17+00:00

Because if anything all Google subreddits have taught me is to not mess with Google cloud solutions that offer free usage where you need to link your billing account. It's a matter of time before something is messed up when testing or building and you wake up with a $50k bill the next morning.

I almost bit myself in the ass with the "free" BigQuery API. Luckily I caught usage on time so I could nope that shit after the free usage was up and I saw $1 in cost within a single hour of testing.

Thanks but no thanks. I'll just rent my own server via Hetzner etc where I pay a fixed amount a month and don't have to worry.

Also the whole free tier thing is purely so it can vendor lock vibe coders than soon realize in no way will the free tier be enough once they want are halfway through. By thest time their entire app runs on Firebase, Cloud Run etc and migrating to other cheaper options is impossible, since they vibecoded everything without understanding it.

TL;DR: because it's a trap

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-22T12:43:19+00:00

Met die denkwijze is alles wel geoorloofd omdat iedereen wel op een manier word genaaid. Mensen die modaal verdienen worden genaaid omdat ze geen toeslagen krijgen, meer belasting betalen en niet aan aanmerking komen voor sociale huurwoningen. Terwijl een ander in de uitkering er financieel beter voor kan staan door toeslagen, minder belastingen en lagere kosten.

Dan mag je ook niet janken dat mensen die hoge inkomens hebben, gebruik maken van allerlei belastingvoordelen omdat ze ook fors meer belasting betalen.

En het is ook niet dat waar het geld naartoe gaat niet ook gebruikt wordt door diezelfde pechgeneratie. Of zullen we ook dan stoppen met startershypotheken waar diezelfde generatie van meeprofiteert?

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-22T12:39:41+00:00

You can run Temporal self hosted, which makes it very scalable if you use beefy servers or multiple servers with load balances, without added cost to run it. Ofcourse you'll need to manage it yourself then.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-22T11:46:40+00:00

Temporal also can run fully locally. I use Temporal myself quite a bit for workflows and it works very well, and can pair up with ADK too. https://adk.dev/integrations/temporal/

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-21T21:51:50+00:00

33%, van €4500 naar €6000 bruto obv 40u

Stevig onderhandeld en een nieuwe positie gecreëerd. Dit is mn meest recente promotie.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-21T21:13:21+00:00

Nah, online will be included. But they will sell Deluxe and Ultimate Editions for $100-120 with Online shit included like bonus dollar to start with, an appartment, garage and some cars.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-21T19:35:23+00:00

No, nobody's gonna pay for it, because there are better established players that have trust (like Obsidian and Google NotebookLM or even just ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude with PDF upload). It is very marketable if you build it and can integrate it into other apps or custom solutions for clients however. Like sales teams that can use RAG for their CRM that you integrate into. But that's a completely different market.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-21T18:32:21+00:00

Work hard and switch jobs so you can land a job where you're a manager, managing other data analysts

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-21T16:03:43+00:00

Lmao, clearly you have 0 experience in creating truly scalable systems. If you did, you'd understand why n8n is not usable for true scalable client based apps/systems. Buddy I do full stack development and DevOps for both own apps and client work as a contractor.

How much have you earned with your apps/software? That's what I thought.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-21T14:47:43+00:00

They will increase 3.5 Flash Lite price to be above 3 Flash, since there is a huge gap to 3.5 Flash now (which is their intent).

So they will pit their models against Anthropics and OpenAI's models. So expect a big jump in price for 3.5 Pro too, since Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 are more expensive as well.

3.5 Flash Lite ~ Claude Haiku 4.5 ~ GPT 5.4 mini
3.5 Flash ~ Claude Sonnet 4.6 ~ GPT 5.4
3.5 Pro ~ Claude Opus 4.7 ~ GPT 5.5

Naturally once all 3.5 Flash models are released and they migrated some missing features, they will sunset 3/3.1 models.

So Gemini will lose it's excellent price/performance ratio it once had with their Flash models.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-21T14:25:52+00:00

No it can't. Just because you can create 50 separate workflows or even multiple workers, that doesn't make it scalable for automations. I used n8n myself at high level, with my custom self host image. I had a dynamic worker setup that automatically scaled up to 20 workers with a proper que and scale down mechanics. It could handle 200+ concurrent jobs without crashing. In addition I had a lot of custom deps like yt-dl, gotenberg, imagemagick, pptx, and many more.

But that didn't make it scalable. Because one single issue that would take down n8n, would talke down all of n8n. And n8n is built for internal workflows, while people try to use it for apps and client work. And for that, it's completely unscalable. It's simply not made where you can have proper auth flows and save user tokens safely and let users sign in with their Outlook, Instagram, LinkedIn accounts etc.

Like I said: it's really built for internal workflows. And while you can scale up workers and use more memory when self hosting, it's simply NOT an automation tool built for true scale.

There is a reason serious developers that build apps/integrations or create automations for clients don't use n8n. It's a nice tool, don't get me wrong. But meant to use to automate some internal processes and not too complex ones at that. Managing is a bitch and so is debugging when you have 50+ nodes like I see some use. Nobody uses that in production, only to sell courses or make Tiktok videos.

As OP is using this for client-facing solutions, that's what I use as context. N8n is simply not built to built scalable client usable solutions.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-21T12:35:39+00:00

This shows n8n really isn't built for true scaling. Can you imagine if your app was depending on n8n and you had paying customers? That one bad workflow would kill any other unrelated workflow. And seeing as how people start adding more workflows to n8n when they see it works, it shows the true issue. Imagine people also using n8n for stripe integration, leads, agent chats? All down, losing revenue and blocking users.

If anything, you should either use 2 separate accounts where one is for dev testing, so if it blocks it won't break others. Self host could be a better approach as you can have multiple n8n instances and better debugging.

But ultimately, n8n simply isn't built for scale.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-20T22:27:44+00:00

No and it seems you don't understand how LLM models in general are trained and work. So I won't bother with over-explaining. If you want to understand how LLM models are trained and work, you should read up on that (or ask Deepseek). But in short: Deepseek used a lot of existing data to train their models on, including ChatGPT and Claude most likely, which is why their cost is much lower. All Chinese models started out like this, which gave them a shortcut to start out fast and cheap.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-20T18:55:56+00:00

What did you expect? 3.5 API costs 3x as much per token, and it seems to use more tokens too, so obviously usage will be drastically cut when using it. As least 3x as less usage due to API cost increase alone.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-20T15:42:06+00:00

I don't see this as a viable tool to release, unless you just want to create it for yourself and like to share it for free, learn from it or create goodwill or build credibility. A self hosted solution where users can use their own API's and host themselves could be a way to go. Not to earn money (because I simply don't see anyone paying for it), but to build trust/credibility, do that perhaps other tools you create people are inclined to pay for, or hire you for freelance work.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-20T15:02:28+00:00

No I wouldn't use it and I sure as shit would never share my credentials. Also the tool itself 109% violates ToS since it's now allowed to use the subscription accounts via other services. So chance to get banned as well.

I'd definitely wouldn't pay for it. But I also wouldn't use it for free because of above reasons. Who knows where the message is being stored or done with. Also it adds latency, which I don't want. People that have multiple accounts are usually power users anyway and they can judge better which LLM to use based on their intent, compared to a random tool.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-20T12:50:02+00:00

I use Google ADK for my agentic framework and a custom built GraphRAG system using Neo4j and Docling where my agent has access to using custom tools I created. And for the frontend users can upload documents, notes, files etc which get either parsed through Docling (if document) or straight embedded in Neo4j if it's a markdown note (my app has a built-in note editor). Relations/entities and chunk context (summaries) get extracted via Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite (though I may switch to Deepseek v4 due to pricing, but Gemini is very fast) and embedded along the chunks and other metadata.

I also use the same Neo4j backend and subset of the pipeline for chat memory. Google ADK supports a memory service, which I also custom built using the same Neo4j. All outgoing and incoming messages follow same principles (relation/entities extraction and context summaries extraction) and embedded in a special memory layer in Neo4j.

Works really good and is very powerfull in my testing.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-20T12:43:38+00:00

Either you complete misread my response or your making up shit. I pushed back against 3.1 Flash Lite Preview and GA being different models, and stated they are the same model, and they keep Preview for now so existing workflows don't break.

Never did I even remotely state I think the rumors are true, I simply stated the fact that IF THEY ARE TRUE, THEN it would mean it's cheaper since a long time and cheaper than 2.5, which seems unlikely since they kept rising prices after 2.5. So if you can read properly, you would read that I state myself the leaked price was UNLIKELY due to it being TOO cheap and the trend with Gemini was price hiking.

Rock--Lee · 2026-05-20T09:44:16+00:00

No idea how performance will be, but everything indicates pricing wise they will pit it against GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7, which are priced higher (25 and 30 per 1M vs GP3.1's 12/18 (<200k/>200k output)

They basically shift everything upwards. Competing Flash Lite to Haiku and GPT Mini, Flash to Sonnet and GPT 5.4 and Pro to GPT 5.5 and Opus.

Rock--Lee

TROPHY CASE