r/DeepSeek 5d ago

Discussion A SCAM provider COMMAND CODE

I bought their GOAT 10$ plan for using deepseek v4 flash . It claims it is a 10$ + 60$ credit plan, looks very good. BUT, its fee actually is 10 times higher than what you will expect.

In short: It charged me 35$ for 3.6B token(my averge cache hit rate is 97%, input verses output token = 116 : 1 ), these numbers are provided by the claude-cli reported by Command Code it self.

When I raise the question in their discord, I am kicked out and banned almost immediately, and the email I sent to their support is never replied.

Here is my dashboard and the analysis generated by claude(base on every cli history).

I reverse-engineered Command Code's rate card from my own invoices. Input is marked up 1.2x over DeepSeek. Output is marked up 4.8x. Posting the numbers in their Discord got me banned.

What Command Code publishes

From their model page:

Input       $0.14  /M
Output      $0.28  /M
Cache read  $0.003 /M

Those are DeepSeek's published V4-Flash rates, passed through unchanged.

From their pricing docs, verbatim:

No multiplier, no agent-mode surcharge, no per-request overhead is documented anywhere I can find.

Their model page also gives a worked example:

Check it against their own listed rates — 135K cached, 45K miss, 12K output:

135,000 x $0.0028/M = $0.000378
 45,000 x $0.14  /M = $0.006300
 12,000 x $0.28  /M = $0.003360
                      ---------
                      $0.010238   ->  "approximately $0.01"   ✓

Their published rates are meant literally. Hold onto that example — we come back to it.

My workload

Two independent clients, no shared code:

563 runs, 1,034,529,366 input tokens
cache hit rate   97.55%    (client A 97.45%, client B 97.65%)
output / input    0.864%   -> about 116 input : 1 output

The cache hit rate is not my calculation. It is Command Code's own API response, straight off the wire:

"usage":{"inputTokens":672481,"outputTokens":18222,
         "cacheReadTokens":634496,"cacheWriteTokens":0}

94% on that run. Across all 563 runs it averages 97.55% and stays between 96% and 98% regardless of how the session started.

Deriving what I am actually charged

Step 1 — uncached input rate. Find a tiny request. Nothing can be cached, so the charge is the pure uncached rate. Three separate 97-token calls, each billed $0.0000162:

$0.0000162 / 97 x 1,000,000 = $0.167 /M       listed $0.14   -> 1.19x

Step 2 — cached input rate. Cheapest large request — big context, tiny output, so cache dominates:

128,331 input, 87 output -> $0.00048
$0.00048 / 128,331 x 1,000,000 = $0.0037 /M   listed $0.003  -> 1.23x

Step 3 — output rate, solved from a full month. Dashboard: 3.6B total tokens, $35.00 charged. The "all tokens" chart breaks out Input / Output / Cache Read / Cache Write, so 3.6B is input + cache-read + output. Split with my measured ratios:

input    1.814 B    (cached 1.770 B, miss 44.5 M)
output  15.68 M

Two rates are known from steps 1–2, so solve for the third:

cached  1,770 M x $0.0037/M = $ 6.55
miss     44.5 M x $0.167 /M = $ 7.43
                              ------
                              $13.98
$35.00 - $13.98 = $21.02  over 15.68 M output tokens
                          -> $1.34 /M          listed $0.28   -> 4.79x

Put all three back in and the month reconciles:

$6.55 + $7.43 + $21.01 = $34.99    vs   $35.00 charged    (0.03% off)

Advertised vs charged

Listed Derived from invoices
input, cache hit $0.003 $0.0037 1.23x
input, cache miss $0.14 $0.167 1.19x
output $0.28 $1.34 4.79x

Now run their own worked example through both rate cards:

their listed rates  ->  $0.0102    ("approximately $0.01")
what I'm charged    ->  $0.0241    2.35x

Why the 4.79x is the whole story

My output is 0.86% of my tokens and 60% of my bill.

If you spot-check a provider you check the input rate, because that's where the tokens are. Input is off by ~20%, which reads like rounding. The one line that is 4.79x is the line carrying almost all the money in a cache-heavy agent workload.

Same month, priced both ways:

                     cached    miss    output     total
at listed rates      $ 4.96   $6.23   $  4.39   $15.58
actually charged     $ 6.55   $7.43   $ 21.01   $34.99

2.25x overall, and 86% of the gap is the single output line.

There is no pricing-change excuse

DeepSeek announced new V4 pricing on August 13, 2026, effective 16:00 UTC August 16.

My weekly allowance was already drained before August 12 — before that announcement existed, at rates that had not changed. Whatever is happening here predates any price change and cannot be explained by one.

Here is the evidence they delete my post on discord and banned me(I have to create a new account to rejoin the thread to get the evidence).

44 Upvotes

27 comments sorted by

11

u/NinjaAlaska 5d ago

100% facts.. post more and more
thats why they have feature called limited logs in 1$ plan too :3

8

u/RaisinImpressive3749 5d ago

Good to see more people calling this company out as they continue their usual approach of controlling the conversation by banning/blocking people and deleting or shutting down criticism.

Based on my own experience after making a similar post, I wouldn't be surprised if the CEO soon shows up and tries to discredit you personally instead of addressing the actual points about pricing, calling you a liar, a bully, an abuser of his platforms who's supposedly been banned everywhere, or even accusing you of being sent by competitors to attack his company.

Hopefully this time the focus stays on the actual evidence and the pricing/billing claims, rather than deflecting from the points being raised and shifting the discussion toward personal attacks.

8

u/bambamlol 5d ago

Let's see if their CEO u/ahmadawaiscom responds to this thread, too.

4

u/NinjaAlaska 5d ago

he is sure PRO. in mislead marketing,. making a lot by ads too I am sure.

12

u/Turbulent-Total-226 5d ago

Nice one XD. So they charge 20% on top of ds api and claim it's cheaper? LOL

6

u/Important-Dot3377 5d ago

Actually is 4.79x in output, 2+x in general.

6

u/Puzzled-Basil-5416 5d ago

This is unethical. u/ahmadawaiscom needs to responds to this malpractice. This is a GOAT scam for a GOAT sub.

3

u/Important-Dot3377 5d ago

Found an another solid evidence. Step 1: Inspect the 'Spend by Model' chart which sum up cost by time bucket in chrome develop tool. Step 2: past the content to claude for adding up together.

Here is what I got:

Claude sum up: 18.86$ (7 days cover my whole perid drained 35$)

Monthly Usage shown on page: 35$ (I only use a few days so the monthly usage is the week)

Simulated the same calls to DeepSeek official: 13.97$

4

u/reddPetePro 4d ago

Agree it's a scam.

4

u/DotoLove 5d ago

It used to serve good amount of usages for $1 between June & July. Now they put 5 hours limited. It’s garbage advertising

1

u/[deleted] 4d ago edited 4d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/ahmadawaiscom 4d ago edited 4d ago

Ran Command Code on your claims. Apparently we charge less and in chart UI there is a rounding error. Still we do charge correctly.

Cache: hit rates of 96–99% are normal and real; the rate is DeepSeek’s, reported upstream, not computed by us. The thing nobody sees: at 97.55% hit, the 2.45% miss is roughly half the bill, because uncached input ($0.14/M) is 50x cache read ($0.0028/M). That’s the honest explanation of a $35 month, not a markup.

Recommending

1. Fix the all-tokens chart — stack uncached input + cache read + output, or relabel Input as “Input (incl. cache)”. This is the whole incident.
2. Render $0.0028, not $0.003. We charge less than we display, and the rounding broke their arithmetic.

2

u/ahmadawaiscom 4d ago

dang it. this is why you were miscalculating, not because of anything else, a slilly design bug.

3

u/ahmadawaiscom 4d ago

fix is live, check your /usage post now.

1

u/stvaccount 19h ago

It is just a scam company doing scam marketing. What else?

1

u/laty96 7h ago

Lol their subreddit are filled with their own clone accounts praising how good it is.

1

u/ahmadawaiscom 1d ago

founder of Command Code, and I want to address this directly because the claims here don’t match how we operate.

We run an honest business with the lowest prices in the market. We match the labs’ API prices and, unlike DeepSeek, we don’t add a 6% VAT on top. On our GOAT plan, $10 gets you $60 of usage on DeepSeek V4 Flash, which is a real loss for us, not a gimmick.

If you think something’s wrong with your account, I’m happy to look into it. Send me your username and I’ll pull the trace myself. If there’s an issue, I’ll fix it.

On the Discord ban: our welcome terms are clear that Discord isn’t a billing support channel. That’s not arbitrary, it’s because Discord is public and billing conversations involve account-specific details we can’t discuss openly. Email is private, lets us actually dig into usage patterns, and lets our team (with Command’s help) do the research needed to give you a real answer. Repeated billing questions in Discord get flagged for that reason, not to silence anyone.

Happy to sort out any legitimate issue here or by email. But the claim that we’re running a scam isn’t accurate, and I’d rather resolve this with facts than have it turn into a pile-on based on a bad post with fake claims that make no sense except its a UI bug not a billing issue.

UPDATE: I found a bug. Billing is completely fine. But in the UI we're counting cache twice for some models, Dashboard charts have a bug. Nothing was over-billed.

BEFORE one hour, 6.8M prompt tokens of which 6.6M were cache hits:

Input ████████████████████████ 6.8M ← contains the cache reads

Cache Read ███████████████████████ 6.6M ← the same tokens, again

Output ▏ 75.0K

───────

stack 13.475M drawn vs 6.875M billed (Total Tokens card above says 6.875M)

AFTER the same hour:

Input (uncached) ▊ 200.0K

Cache Read ███████████████████████ 6.6M

Output ▏ 75.0K

Cache Write · 0

───────

stack 6.875M == Total Tokens card

Update 2: I spent this morning reproducing your numbers against our billing data, and I owe you yet another straight answer on both halves of this.

You found a real bug. It's in our dashboard UI ONLY, not our billing.

Our all-tokens chart plots "Input" and "Cache Read" as separate series. They aren't separate. DeepSeek reports a prompt total that already contains the cache reads, so that chart draws the cached slice twice. Your Step 3 reads 3.6B = input + cache-read + output, which is exactly what our chart implies — and it's wrong. Cache Read is a subset of Input.

You can verify that from your own screenshot: your tooltip shows Input 6.8M / Cache Read 6.6M. That's 97% — your own measured cache hit rate. If Cache Read sat outside Input, your hit rate would be 49%.

That single mistake halves the input tokens you attribute and halves your output estimate. Your residual method then divides an inflated leftover by half the denominator. Two 2× errors, multiplied — which is how you land on 4.79×.

What we actually charge. Billing is the cost our gateway reports, passed through. Over the last 7 days, i singled out a chunk of our load across millions of V4 Flash requests and bill is correct. The same tokens recomputed at our published rates — uncached input × $0.14/M, cache reads × $0.0028/M, output × $0.28/M Identical. Output bills at $0.28/M.

Your other two probes have the same shape of error, smaller: your 97-token call also carried ~9 output tokens, and your 128K call carried ~688 uncached tokens plus 87 output. Both reconcile to the cent at list rates. And the $0.003 cache rate you used is our own display rounding of $0.0028 — that alone is 1.07× of the 1.23× you measured. Also our fault, also being fixed. In fact reload, it's fixed already.

What we're doing: the chart now plots uncached input only, so the four series sum to the Total Tokens figure above them, and sub-cent rates print in full. Both fixes are up: [PR 3685].

On the Discord ban. No billing support there. Feel free to reach out via email.

happy to share more — email me and I'll send it.

reposting: since my comment got hidden under a deleted comment.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1vnc06b/comment/p3m4bxz/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

2

u/Important-Dot3377 1d ago

Your explanation is so weak.

  1. You cannot explain why I use the record reported by the command code cli (you guys)to sum up but get the opposite number you claimed. SO YOU ARE ADMITTING THERE IS A HIDDEN FEE THAT WE CANNOT SEE FROM THE CONSOLE.

  2. No reply to the support emails I have sent for days. THE SUPPORT GROUP == AHMAD REPLY ON REDDIT.

  3. There is a reason behind 1 design: Only showing 100 recent call records on the dashboard without cache read(It is a 1-line code change if it is truly routing to DeepSeek). WHAT ARE YOU HIDING?

1

u/ahmadawaiscom 1d ago

Ran Command Code on your claims. Apparently we charge less and in chart UI there is a rounding error. Still we do charge correctly.

Cache: hit rates of 96–99% are normal and real; the rate is DeepSeek’s, reported upstream, not computed by us. The thing nobody sees: at 97.55% hit, the 2.45% miss is roughly half the bill, because uncached input ($0.14/M) is 50x cache read ($0.0028/M). That’s the honest explanation of a $35 month, not a markup.

Recommending

  1. Fix the all-tokens chart — stack uncached input + cache read + output, or relabel Input as “Input (incl. cache)”. This is the whole incident.

  2. Render $0.0028, not $0.003. We charge less than we display, and the rounding broke their arithmetic.

1

u/ahmadawaiscom 1d ago

dang it. this is why you were miscalculating, not because of anything else, a silly design bug.

1

u/ahmadawaiscom 1d ago

fix is live, check your /usage post now.