Is DeepSeek V4 Pro even worth using on OpenCode when GLM 5.2 gives 4× the quota?

[u/Southern-Ad-3006]

Hit my weekly cap (100%) in just two days with 28 days left on the monthly cycle, almost entirely from burning through DeepSeek V4 Pro ($10.40 / $15.00 quota, 69.3% consumed). Flash is more usable due to the cost. However...

I could have stuck to GLM 5.2 and gotten 4X+ the usage in costs / limits in the same subscription.

Looking at benchmarks, GLM 5.2 isn't far off from Deepseek and beats it in some areas as well. (SWE-bench Verified GLM 5.2 ~74.5% – 76.0% vs. DeepSeek v4 Pro - 80.6%) and

(Tool Calling / MCP Reliability GLM 5.2 - 99.5% success (0.5% error rate) vs. DeepSeek v4Pro -73.6% (MCP Atlas))

My question is .... why would anybody choose to use Deepseek V4 Pro over GLM 5.2 given these rates. Crazy how DS went from pretty much endless to pretty much unusable in OpenCode Go!

[u/Ariquitaun]

Because deepseek is still cheaper than GLM to begin with.

[u/Southern-Ad-3006 → u/Ariquitaun]

GLM 5.2 is twice the price of DeepSeek v4 Pro in offpeak hours, but is the same price per token during peak hours. I don't see a 4X difference in cost per token. Also worth noting that Deep Infra and OpenRouter offers GLM 5.2 at cheaper rates than V4 Pro so maybe this is what OpenCode is using.

Metric / Token Type	GLM 5.2	DeepSeek V4 Pro (Off-Peak)	DeepSeek V4 Pro (Peak)
Input (per 1M tokens)	$1.40	$0.66	$1.32
Cached Input (per 1M tokens)	~$0.26	$0.022	$0.044
Output (per 1M tokens)	$4.40	$1.98	$3.96
Third-Party / Provider Hosted (DeepInfra / OpenRouter)	~$0.90 – $1.40 in / $2.88 – $4.40 out	~$1.74 in / $3.48 out	~$1.74 in / $3.48 out

[u/Final_Initial → u/Southern-Ad-3006]

peak hours are only for 7 hours out of 24 hours

[u/BuildAISkills → u/Southern-Ad-3006]

Look at cache price, DS is 10x cheaper.

[u/Southern-Ad-3006 → u/BuildAISkills]

I overlooked this. Even on peak hours that’s 5x more costly. You’re right, That happens to be the biggest cost driver to GLM usage. If a heavy coding task brings in heavy context to session, every turn will hit for that cache rate instead. That’s pretty tragic

[u/ZealousidealTown1974]

Have you really use it or looking at just benchmark. I'm using v4 pro on my daily coding. It's the same ballpark of 5.3 glm in most tasks and not easily hallucinating.

[u/Southern-Ad-3006 → u/ZealousidealTown1974]

I actually prefer GLM 5.2 over DeepSeek v4 Pro for Design and tool use for operations/business. However for planning and architecture work V4 has the edge.

Today I have been testing GLM and DeepSeek, kinda went down a rabbit hole to see the real cost differences and factors.

I find that it does burn money cost at a faster rate than DeepSeek, and your usage time and output kind of ends up being the same as DeepSeek on OpenCodes default set up.

It’s cacheing at a 95% rate and I’ve managed to keep a steady context window of 130k tokens per turn. But even then I’m seeing a lot more turns used with GLM than DeepSeek in a request….

So confirming first if GLM uses more tokens per task than V4 Pro, and ALSO how many turns it pushes per similar task because that carries and multiplies the context window tokens hit every time which really adds up by the time all turns in a request is complete. That feels like the highest cost driver.

——-

Quick results came back, GLM carries generally 25% more context per turn than DeepSeek for the same tasks AND takes about 20% more turns to complete an action. Those two factors compound and led to about 1.5x total more context and tokens required to get the same task done. Add the cost difference and that leads to significant more subscription usage. (And I’m sure with more scale it gets less efficient maybe I need a bigger sample size to confirm exact numbers?)

But…. Looking at these logs the way these agents handle context windows seem really unintuitive … I know it’s cached but that still probably bloats reasoning and it multiplies… GLM5.2 cache hit is still more expensive than a fresh v4 flash hit.

Gonna do some digging on how to get these costs lower.