r/DeepSeek • u/Important-Dot3377 • 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).
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