Show HN: DeepSeek Flash inverted the economics of agent products(rtrvr.ai)
rtrvr.ai
Show HN: DeepSeek Flash inverted the economics of agent products
https://www.rtrvr.ai/blog/code-as-plan-deepseek-flash-text-only-browser-agent
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https://www.rtrvr.ai/blog/code-as-plan-deepseek-flash-text-only-browser-agent
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Model labs charged developers higher API prices to subsidize their own agent harness offerings. Think Anthropic charging 5x higher Claude API prices to subsidize consumer subscriptions. So Cursor in a way was subsidizing their own direct competitor.
DeepSeek V4 Flash totally inverted this relationship. Now you have a model that beats even Sonnet in some benchmarks and is totally opensourced. Now inference providers are racing to the bottom to optimize and give cheaper hosting. Every player with a non-SOTA is now racing to swap over to stop paying the big model lab tax, even Microsoft is switching Copilot to use DeepSeek.
On switching over to Deepseek:
- we noticed over a 100x cost decrease while similar or better performance then Gemini 3 Flash
- insane saving from the cached input tokens: $0.002/1 Million tokens
- both DeepSeek Flash and GLM 5.2 are text-only models, so clearly multimodal training is not worth the additional cost. Language is just a much more efficient sparse representation of the world/reasoning than vision
- we had a early bet on a text-only web agent harness, and now with DeepSeek this results in unique cost advantages.
- we rewrote our harness as a callable DSL library that a model can generate code to execute on. DeepSeek has proven phenomenal on code generation to drive an agent harness.
- I would highly recommend everyone to rewrite their harness to be text-only and callable via executable code leveraging DeepSeek V4 Flash.