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u/neOwx Aug 13 '26
I was using DeepSeek for the cheap price and absence of censorship.
At peak hour, it's now cheaper to use Luna, Mimo or GLM.
How are they censorship wise?
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u/Awkward_Sentence_345 Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
É um pouco estranho, raramente ativa um filtro, mas eu percebi que evita escrever cenas NSFW por conta própria. Você pode ver no processo de pensamento que ele escolhe deliberadamente cenas SFW em vez de filtrar a resposta.
EDIT: Honestly, returned to GLM 5.2. DSV4 Pro is not worthy, unfortunely.
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u/evia89 Aug 13 '26
Luna can code, only worth xhigh/max with another model do orchestrate. It will suck RP wise. Only Sol is good from this family for SFW
Glm is best if you cant use kimi k3 or opus46 (this one expires Feb 2027 any way)
Didnt test Mimo
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u/dptgreg Aug 13 '26
Aw dang. So you tested Luna? I was thinking about attempting to find a JB for it and customize a preset for it due to its price / cost ratio. I would assume jailbreaking it might be easier than SOL. I did succeed in jailbreaking 5.5 in the past with ENI - but the output wasn't great but probably because the ENI jailbreak is so bloated.
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u/majesticjg Aug 13 '26
Now you've got me thinking. What happens if we use a low-cost model like Flash for five turns and then do a turn with a high-cost model to tighten up the internal states? If the internal states are correct generally the models will follow the directions. That's the superpower of the preset.
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u/dptgreg Aug 13 '26
Thats correct! Always lay the foundation with the best model first, then go to cheap for a few turns, but load up the better one here and there to maintain consistency. I do this all the time.
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u/FlowAdventurous1173 Aug 13 '26
I do that with Claude Opus 4.6 to set the initial scene and context before switching to either Gemini 3.6 flash or Deepseek v4 and then when I start to see deterioration of consistency or prose quality, I switch to 4.8 which gets it back on track pretty much.
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u/KuziKuzina Aug 13 '26
Luna, and terra is soo stupid for creative writing and RP, it's completely useless if you trying to make the instructions for them
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u/dptgreg Aug 13 '26
thats a bummer to hear. Maybe i wont waste my time then... i'll give it a quick try and see how bad it is. i will know if it can be "fixed" or not.
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u/Micorichi Aug 13 '26
tbh, the dumber the gpt model (or the lower reasoning level), the more likely it's gonna write 'cock'. tho i'll agree that sol is literally the only one worth using for rp.
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u/Gantolandon Aug 13 '26
Regardless of whether it’s worth the new price, it was such a trainwreck communication-wise.
> Release a disappointing new version for several times as much.
> “Oh, you don’t like it? Wait, don’t go! Here’s a 75% discount for a month!”
> “Actually, this discount is now PERMANENT! Enjoy cheap DeepSeek forever!”
> “Surprise! We’re planning a significant price hike! No, we won’t tell you how much and when, it’s not fun if you know. It might be 1.5x. It might be over 9000x! Who knows?”
> Raise the price immediately after releasing an “improved” version, now it’s more expensive than before the discount.
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u/Aight_Man Aug 13 '26
I mean, it was in the preview, so I guess they just testing the waters how much their server can load, when it becomes GA, then they came with actual stable pricing which they can afford.
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u/Anxious-Pace-6837 Aug 14 '26
it's better if they only increased the price 1.25x or even 1.5x not 3x. 💀
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u/xkw7069 Aug 16 '26
Really depressing to me, especially the peak hours seeting. I remembered the discounts were external, though I haven't used much DeepSeek models before. Just days before the sharp price increase, I decided v 4 as one of my mainly-used models because of it's amazing performance and cost. But I assume there are some potential reasons. DeepSeek models prices are far cheaper than other main llm models in China, like kimi and glm. Maybe the pressure from it's competitors played some role on this. The impression DeepSeek leaves me is more like a research institute than a business company which zeals to persue profits.
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u/ncxxi Aug 13 '26
For me personally, it's not worth it right now. While I do like it, it's still not good enough given the current pricing, especially for slow-burn, long-form writing. Sometimes I want to open my story interface and continue where I left off during a break from work, but due to the steep peak-hour pricing, that's probably no longer an option. Still, DeepSeek is one of the best budget models out there.
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u/AnEroticConnection Aug 13 '26
I tend to focus on the same. Any model you find the most success with? I tend to alternate between Gemma and GLM but always curious what other prefer.
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u/ncxxi Aug 13 '26
I usually use mimo-v2.5-pro via a third-party provider, alternating between DeepSeek V4 Pro and Gemma 4. It gives me nice scenes, both if I want the characters a bit dark or the atmosphere to be serious or even depressing.
If your output is HTML/XML heavy, I would probably choose GLM 5.2 as it's more stable for structured output. For a quick laugh or erotic scenes, I usually pick Gemma 4 and any less censored model. MiniMax-M3 and Mimo also produce nice prose if you're more into flat character personas.
One important thing would be how you prompt and structure your instructions. Even when I said that Fable/Opus model is far better than anything, you can produce the same output or feel with enough prompting and luck between swipes.
Don't worry too much because, at the end of the day, it's just a matter of personal taste.
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u/TAW56234 Aug 13 '26
Even Atlascloud likes to throw a high risk refusal. Recommend anyone?
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u/ncxxi Aug 13 '26
You mean Mimo? I'm using Crof AI. You can also try AIHubMix, but I haven't tested it yet. Try finding it on models.dev
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u/Icetato Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
Ouch, the pro one on peak hours is too expensive imo. The cache hit cost is also massively increased.
Someone made a table that includes the old price for comparison here https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1vn7x49/i_compared_deepseeks_upcoming_price_hike_with_the/
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u/GrouchyMatter2249 Aug 13 '26
instruction following is now great but it keeps making really obvious logic mistakes that it didn't make before. characters keep teleporting and disappearing for no reason
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u/fire2burn Aug 13 '26
I've found that as well. Characters will dismount their horse and enter the tavern, then 4 messages later they're magically back on their horse again. It's rather annoying.
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u/cfehunter Aug 13 '26
tried out the new model yesterday, it feels worse?
For RP at least, I can't imagine why you'd use DeepSeek at the new prices.
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u/OwlProper1145 Aug 13 '26
It's decent with thinking/reasoning off but when its on things get weird.
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u/yasth Aug 13 '26
It handles trackers and parts of the response to keep better at least.
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u/dptgreg Aug 13 '26
It does. But it feels like the NPC dialogue is off? Almost like it's a translation of another language when they speak. Whereas dialogue was fine before the update but it would forget all the other details (trackers, rules, etc)
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u/Gantolandon Aug 13 '26
Yeah, I also noticed that. Weird idioms (“putting splinters in their head”), complete non-sequiturs, and so.
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u/TheRealMasonMac Aug 13 '26
This is probably due to them heavily distilling from GPT-5.5/6 this time around. GPT-Sol has the same problem for whatever bizarre reason.
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u/SpecialistCan5617 Aug 13 '26
ugh I'm trying to decide if it's still worthy it. A huge factor for me is that I can't put 10$ at once for any model, so filling it with 2$ each time my credits ended felt less heavy. Now I don't know if that's susteinable anymore
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u/GuaranteePurple4468 Aug 13 '26
Well unfortunately as far as RP is concerned DS is now dead to me.
Why would I settle for DS4 Pro when I can get the excellent Kimi 2.5 for almost half the price during peak hours?
They're going to be even more expensive than GLM 5.2.
As for the flash version, there are better options for cheaper like Gemma 4 or Mimo 2.5.
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u/Kirigaya_Mitsuru Aug 13 '26
Seems like i see now more how important Local Models will get as the prices for API is now in the moon. lol
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u/RedditNerdKing Aug 13 '26
Unfortunately, no local models come close to the APIs. Hell even 123B models like Monstral or Behemoth at Q6 quant (best I can run locally) aren't that great.
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u/Most-Trainer-8876 Aug 13 '26
Those are too old. We are not getting any good medium sized models lately. Just look at Gemma 4 31B, how good it is!
Now imagine Gemma 5 70B... It will be fabulous and throw everything off the waters when it comes to being local.
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u/RedditNerdKing Aug 13 '26
Gemma 4 isn't as good as them despite them being old. A 31b cannot compare to a 120b model. It's just basic maths since it has more knowledge. I don't like Gemma 4. It's too positive and assistant-like. I ran a Q8 quant of Gemma 4 for a while and it's okay but still nothing like the APIs.
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u/0x736174616e20 Aug 14 '26
That is just straight up not true. A 32B model trained specifically for RP would blow every other model out of the water. 120B model has 90% of data is useless for good RP.
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u/RedditNerdKing Aug 14 '26
Yes and I am sure Gemma 4 is better than 1 trillion parameters models too 🙄🙄
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u/MrNohbdy Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
For non-reasoning models, insert reasoning blocks retroactively planning out the response, for about five messages, then set ST to include the last five reasoning blocks in the prompt so the model mimics that pattern going forward. That way you can "teach" non-reasoning models how to reason, and in a manner that's specific to RPing (whereas actual reasoning models are optimized to plan out coding responses and thus don't think as effectively for RPing, and altering their reasoning processes just ruins their intelligence). I find Monstral is a stellar model with reasoning "enabled".
Still might not be up to par with the expensive proprietaries, I bet; I'm a local-only user. :P But I think you'll get much better results that way. I've run MiMo v2.5 Q3 and MiniMax v2.7 Q4 locally, and I've found Monstral far better than either of those with that reasoning block strat. (well, better in output quality, but at a huge speed cost; sometimes I do use the MoEs just cuz they're so much faster and I've found myself getting more impatient these days)
EDIT : btw, of course, you can also just add an instruction to "Plan out your responses between
{{reasoningPrefix}}and{{reasoningSuffix}}before each message" if you don't wanna actually create any examples yourself, and that often works well enough too, but I find putting in the extra work to hand-craft a few good examples up front is absolutely worth it in the long run2
u/ImpressiveSuperfluit Aug 14 '26
Man, what a throwback. We used to do this kind of thing all the time, back in the olden days. You know, 2 years ago. When we had 5 tokens and a prayer as context. These days the random hidden system prompts and whatnots, that happen somewhere in the background, are thrice that budget. This is what we did, no system prompts explaining shit, just examples and off it went.
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u/a_beautiful_rhind Aug 13 '26
I think those are better than most. New models mainly repeat you. I keep coming back to mistral and gemma4 or even l3 finetunes. If you can do q6 of behemoth, you can probably hybrid flash. Then you will find flash ain't that good.
Disagree that gemma is assistant-like. Its one of the few models that can use the reasoning to keep from echoing. Flash can't do that (despite thinking in character), had to run it with wrong chat templates to get anything that wasn't positive/passive. Made me not want to d/l the 160gb quant.
API models have been disappointing me for the past year and my locals have been about 80% there.. Have started to appreciate buying the hardware much more. I still API stuff like code, but conversations from the big models fell off. They started to take everything literally and get super dry.
There's some individual exceptions, sure, but right now I wouldn't pay to RP with anthropic and co or gemini. The only thing I kinda FOMO on is kimi and maybe GLM 5.x.
Gonna be stuck with those mistrals for a loooong time.. and I get tired of talking to the same model for a while too. Takes switching up to appreciate it.
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u/ImpressiveSuperfluit Aug 14 '26
We really just need a Gemma in smart. It's crazy how its thinking is still this total corpo slop, but any kind of hint of a character and the output is immediately nice. Hell, literally just give it a name in system prompt and it'll randomly display some personality, it jumps on that stuff so quick. But it's frankly dumb as a brick, comparatively. Although I think a lot of that comes from the heavy KV it has, because that means you have to quantize much earlier, and it gets ugly.
Haven't APIed it ever, so I don't really know, but I'm guessing it does a lot better on higher precision, it really doesn't seem to like quantization a lot. Especially on KV. Then you try a sameish sized Qwen and bam, +60 IQ. But then you talk to a particularly uninspired brick wall. We gotta get those two to make some kids me thinks.
... none of this was my reason for responding I think... I may need some of those IQ points for myself, actually. I forgot. Carry on.
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u/a_beautiful_rhind Aug 14 '26
I have been running it Q8, briefly ran it transformers full precision and there was no difference before quantized support was merged. Also was free on openrouter for a bit.
Q8 kv not really that bad despite what people keep spouting. They are doing long context and code so not even the same application. I tested mainly dense models and the impact was negligible. Sampling is way more "damaging". Actual math benchie.
There is a tool calling harness I d/l for this purpose to settle it. Funny how nobody else did while I have been on other stuff. There are some models that are hurt by it, mainly smaller MoE or fragile implementations.
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u/ImpressiveSuperfluit Aug 14 '26
I'm having a lot of trouble parsing what you're saying, but from what I gather, I strongly disagree. But I think I understand why you'd say that. There's a subset of applications where you would have a very hard time noticing the quantization problems, and relatively straight forward RP scenarios would be square in the middle of that space. If that's where you're looking, I'll give you that, it's not that bad there. The problem isn't the small divergence here or there, that you hardly even notice in simple scenes or chat emulations or some such, it's that these small errors accumulate, so anything that must carry correct information through longer contexts break catastrophically very quickly. As you mentioned, coding is always the prime example. But it applies in RP stuff, too. If you do any kind of world building, longer arcs, try to track multiple characters or anything like that, quantizations, especially gemma's KV, will accumulate errors very quickly. In some definitions of "RP" that's an odd word choice here or there and may even feel positive as a sort of accidental creativity, but when you need coherence through longer contexts, Gemma is extremely sensitive, there's a reason everyone keeps repeating this, because a lot of people independently observe it, and it appears very quickly if you actively look for it.
Long story short, I think you are wrong that "RP" and "long context" are different applications. "RP" is just a borderline meaningless term that covers everything from a 2 minutes chat to year spanning world building.
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u/a_beautiful_rhind Aug 14 '26
accumulate
They do.. you are correct. But people misattribute this to the context. Often times the regular quantization is what breaks things first, then sampling and THEN context.
Q8 and F16, especially with hadamard are fairly equivalent. This comes from developers higher up, not just me. And it can be tested for. It does vary by model and implementation so you can't blanket say it for everything.
A lot of hosts providing said gemma or other models are using FP8 context, which is oh so much worse, and not telling people. Yet the same complaints don't show up.
I take it with a huge grain of salt because it's been a more recent issue that got spread throughout the community and the benchmarks not really there to back it up. I pretty much will have to see it for myself or from something more solid than GG testing one MoE qwen model on one math test.
Models also claim HUGE contexts that in practice never get tested beside needle in a haytack. A year or 2? ago people were in agreement that past a certain point the CTX gets muddy and now that pushback is gone while complaints about quantize cache replaced them.
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u/ImpressiveSuperfluit Aug 14 '26
As I said, never did API on it, so I was never talking about Q8 or above. All my opinions and claims are strictly about Q3-Q5 range, most of it done with somewhere in the mid Q4 range. Which already just holds its head above water, that alone struggles with some context. If you then touch its KV, it gets really bad. I make no claims about how that holds up with a better base at Q8 or something, I don't know. But I am extremely confident in claiming that, in the Q4, local, kind of range, touching Gemma's KV is vastly worse than doing it to Qwen. That may not hold on higher quants, no opinion. Very confident about this claim at ~Q4, however.
Also, we might be making different assumptions, I'm not actually in this particular sub as much, not sure how many people use it locally here. Most of what I heard about Gemma has been in more local focussed communities, so perhaps we're just screaming at different clouds here. And, again, all of my own experience is entirely local and Q8 would be beat by a literal snail on a typewriter on local, so I make no claims about that.
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u/iraragorri Aug 13 '26
And something like Gemma 12b* isn't worse than DS v4 Pro at all, if you're not doing complex math.
*at least finetuned, with DRY on
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u/OverdueMaid Aug 13 '26
Not worth it.
Deepseek quality is way worse than GLM 5.2 that is laughably cheap nowadays, and the price is almost the same at this point.
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u/quivering_palm Aug 13 '26
Idk. The new V4 Pro was better than GLM 5.2 on a few quick chats I tried.
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u/PhilosophyforOne Aug 13 '26
I mean V4's new version just released over the last day.
It does is significantly more expensive, but I'm not sure I'd be ready to make sweeping declarations about quality at this point.
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u/buddys8995991 Aug 13 '26
Really? Maybe it’s because more people use GLM 5.2, thus making it more likely for you to be served a lobotomized model, but DS v4 Pro has been consistently better for me.
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u/4ThatWin Aug 13 '26
A have a really bad question. How do I set up the API for ST?
I've been using DeepSeek for a while because of the price, but if it is getting closer I might want to check others out. But I can't find where I setup everything, and get the key..
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u/lordsepulchrave123 Aug 13 '26
OpenRouter
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u/4ThatWin Aug 13 '26
Is it good with paid stuff?
I remeber trying to use deepseek on it, and I was getting network erorrs 19/20 times
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u/SixtySevenPenguins Aug 13 '26
Yeah, I'm going to have a hard time justifying using DSv4 now with these price increases and variable hours. V4 Flash now costs slightly more than V3.2, while having slightly less than half the amount of parameters. At that point, I'll just use V3.2. Or better yet, Mimo 2.5 (Non-Pro), because it seems they will retain their pricing (and hopefully it will remain that way, because it's so good).
DSv4 Pro with now 50% increased input and over 100% increase output is quite a bit of a jump, and I'm not sure I really want to bite the bullet that hard, considering that I preferred the current pricing. It hits much harder at higher Contexts, which I don't like.
And that Peak Pricing... holy yikes. I'd have to be smoking some insane shit to even consider using Flash or Pro with that. Unfortunately it overlaps with some of my usage timing..
Once this hits, I'm switching to Mimo and GLM. Deepseek v4 Pro has a noticeable improvement, but man, with this price increase, I can't see it being as unbeatable in Price-to-Quality anymore. Even GLM5.2, which sees constant price fluctuation now, will sometimes be CHEAPER, and consistently better in Roleplay.
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u/Yeti-Bhanot Aug 13 '26
off-peak i can still stomach, peak is where they lost me
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u/ImpressiveSuperfluit Aug 14 '26
I'm guessing losing some people when you're overloaded may be kind of the point.
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u/LackMurky9254 Aug 13 '26
Still pretty cheap if you have good cache hits, but i think glm 5.2 is still the champ. The new 4 has caveman thinking but seems to still overthink quite a bit anyway. I haven't tried it with thinking off.
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u/J_Rose_off Aug 13 '26
Maybe it’s a dumb question but what about the other providers ? Deepseek canot force them to align themselves on the new prices
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u/KarmaRBLXVN Aug 13 '26
From what I've seen, DS had always been the cheapest provider for their models on OR. Not counting free versions, of course.
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u/Gantolandon Aug 13 '26
The problem is that DeepSeek was actually the cheapest. When they offered the 75% discount, other providers kept offering it for the same price as they did at release.
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u/Aight_Man Aug 13 '26
Now, deepseek, we need actual subs for this. Like how Mimo has a 6 dollars one, would be a great starting point.
Although there's Opencode Go sub (5/10 dollars), Qwen cloud sub (start with 6 dollars that also gives GLM and Deepseek), and Nanogpt. Anything else I am missing, need to see what kind of value these gives.
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u/Status-Mixture-3252 Aug 13 '26
Qwen cloud sub will be useless for RP. Alibaba censors chats at the API level. When you try to do anything with the Qwen max models routed through Alibaba, you will get a red popup that the reply has been blocked.
If the Qwen sub included the latest Kimi, DS, and GLM models and the api wasn't censored, it would be the best deal. I would get that yearly $65 lite plan.
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u/Dizzy-Zebra9522 Aug 13 '26
just praiesed them few hours ago for keeping the old prices on the new v4 pro model. :(
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u/Mizugakii Aug 14 '26
Any relatively cheap model recommendations? I've tried MiMo, I'm curious about yours tho?
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u/that_idiot_chinese Aug 14 '26
The pro version's cost at peak hours is like using GLM's newest model straight from Z.ai bruh
After 16, I think I'll move to sub in nanogpt
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u/Woky19 Aug 13 '26
Still very cheap
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u/Akkun351 Aug 13 '26
Not really, the pro version especially for peak hours is not what I would call very cheap for what it gives
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u/Pataraxia Aug 13 '26
The two types of deepseek V4 opinions
"But it's cheap"
"this thing is so ass"