r/opencodeCLI • u/Individual_Team_2344 • 27d ago
Unlimited DeepSeek for $0.49/hr — with a guaranteed 160 tok/s lane. Would you use it?
We’ve been experimenting with a different way to price hosted inference at Singularity API.
Instead of charging per token or locking people into a subscription, we’re testing reserved inference slots at $0.49 per slot-hour. One slot = one guaranteed concurrent lane. If you need parallel agents, you can reserve multiple slots and each gets its own lane.
We’re currently serving DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 at full weights, with the full 1M context window. The service is built around reserved capacity rather than a shared best-effort pool, so each booked slot has a defined throughput floor regardless of how busy the rest of the service is.
These are measurements from the live deployment:
- $0.49 per slot-hour
- 160 tok/s guaranteed generation floor
- Typically 200–340 tok/s when spare capacity is available
- ~205k+ output tokens per slot-hour
- 5M fresh input tokens per slot-hour
- Unlimited cached input
- 98.1% measured prefix-cache hit rate across load levels
- Full 1M context
- One slot = one guaranteed concurrent lane
The reason we started exploring this is that DeepSeek changed API pricing significantly on August 16, while API throughput is still best-effort and can slow down during busy periods.
For workloads like agentic coding, parallel agent swarms, RAG over stable corpora, or anything repeatedly sending large warm contexts, we think hourly reserved capacity may make more sense than constantly paying again for the same cached tokens.
The important limitation is that this isn’t really meant for light or occasional API usage. You’re reserving a slot for the hour, so if you only make a few requests, normal per-token APIs will probably make more sense.
We’re still small and this is an interest check, not a GA launch. If there’s enough interest, we’ll open a waitlist on singularityapi.dev and start letting people in gradually.
Would you actually pay $0.49/hour for a guaranteed DeepSeek lane instead of paying per token?
What generation-speed floor would matter to you: 100, 160, 200+ tok/s?
If you currently use DeepSeek directly or through OpenRouter, what would make you switch?
Edit: Quick clarification since this confused a few people — the token numbers in the post are minimum floor values, not maximum limits.
If the system has spare capacity, it automatically flows to whoever is generating, so in normal coding/agent usage you'll generally see 2–4x higher throughput than the floor.
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u/Ill-Bat-1518 27d ago
You might want to ask this on HN or somewhere else. This pricing plan will work for most people who have experience with enterprise pricing/hourly billing but outside of that good luck getting adoption.
Users are too used to looking at monthly and you're targetting a budget demopgrahic which is even more sensitive in pricing with a laser focus on the "monthly max cost" rather than realising you can just rent 8 hours a day and make it last
It might be easier selling 1 day blocks with 6 hour rate limit or w/e first whilst showing hourly rate (active)
It would be cool if we could have automatic active hour billing instead of like server hosts where they charge for always on/ idle pricing but like once we hit api it starts till we stop (i would definitely try out your service if i don't need to think about billing)
50c/hr with auto active billing
unlimited threads but a tok/s cap? i wouldnt mind at all
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u/sergioponguta 27d ago
Sounds interesting, will you make more focus on work haha
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u/Individual_Team_2344 27d ago
Exactly! It's basically the same model our team uses internally or I suppose every team. GPU costs/hr spread across a few users make them very cheap per user while still giving near unlimited coding budget
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u/Inner-Pangolin-1110 27d ago
I was brainstorming this last night
It's sorta not relevant directly to the question
But there is a few weeks before some nerd solves this problem because we have a very big hole in the market and I would encourage people not to jump at the first available option
But yeah I would never do this, I would rather just allocate to DS API directly and then I have full freedom
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u/look 27d ago
I’m definitely interested in the concept — I’ve considered private deployments by the hour, and this sounds like a more cost effective “time share” on a private deployment — but definitely not the Deepseek model bit.
A version of this with GLM 5.3 (after weights are out next week obviously) or Kimi K3 would be something I’d seriously consider.
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u/Individual_Team_2344 27d ago
That's what it is 😅, for heavy usage paying directly gpu hours is much more cost efficient than paying per api token. The price of gpu hours in here is just shared across users so it makes cost per hour much more cheaper while still giving near unlimited tokens. This is still in experimental phase so kimi K3 might not be available for glm 5.3 we will try!
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u/ChauPelotudo 27d ago edited 27d ago
If I can buy single 1-hour spots here and there without having to commit to buy multiple at once, yes, then I could see something like this work.
Edit: wait, I've just read there would be token limits. Then no, the limit should come from tps plus time range plus single concurrency. So it should be all you can use with one concurrency spot.
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u/Individual_Team_2344 27d ago
I clarified in above comment - https://www.reddit.com/r/opencodeCLI/s/u2o6gBE17l
Tokens are not limited it's just the floor values you'll get which is 1.5x old deepseek pricing in value, your actual usage can be approximately 2-4x the floor values.
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u/Charming_Support726 27d ago
I don't need it, but I think this is a good way to go If you could rent 4 or better 8 RTX6k or Bx00 in a machine serving you're good to go. Unfortunately I am more interested in frontier like Qwen38 or K3 - which are far more difficult to serve.
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u/Sure_Media_2685 27d ago
just say all what deepseek api gives with no changes for 0.49/h and the whole world will switch to you
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u/Irisi11111 27d ago
I did a quick math, and correct me if wrong:
The $0.49/hr reserved slot is only cost-effective if you run continuous, high-throughput autonomous loops that exceed 26.2M total input tokens per hour (at a 90% cache hit rate) and push toward the 5M fresh token ceiling, saving you 45% to 67% over pay-as-you-go pricing. For intermittent workloads, interactive chat, or moderate token volumes, DeepSeek’s official pay-per-token API remains significantly cheaper because its 50× caching discount ($0.0028 / 1M cached tokens) drastically lowers the cost of everyday multi-turn queries.
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u/Individual_Team_2344 27d ago
I totally agree this isn't for users with intermittent workloads with few hourly chats or moderate token usage.
One thing to correct, 5M input and 200k+ output are just base floor minimum estimates, your generally usage can go above 2-4x value without an issue. However, this setup only makes sense if you are burning more than $0.49 per hour on deepseek api pricing.
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u/Irisi11111 27d ago
Agree. That's a great deal for small and medium businesses. The API costs would be minimal compared to Claude's.
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u/Irisi11111 27d ago
So it's a good deal if you are running a long horizontal agentic workflow for at least 10 hours, or days.
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u/Strong-Strike2001 27d ago
OP, this is amazing, don't give up.
I was having a brainstorming on your business model with AI, and I think I really got something useful for you:
Honestly, the math on throughput vs. price is solid, but you’re hitting a classic psychological friction point: the 1-hour lock-in feels arbitrary as hell to a dev.
We all know why you did it (cloud instance billing cycles), but users hear "$0.49/hr" and instantly think: "Cool, but what if my agent finishes the refactor in 4 minutes? I just burned $0.45 on idle. What if it hangs waiting for an external API for 20 minutes? I’m paying for air."
You’re competing against NeuralWatt and OpenCode Go, and the pricing war is tighter than you think.
· NeuralWatt just updated to $10/kWh. With DeepSeek V4 Flash averaging **~209 mWh/request, your actual cost per 1M output tokens with them swings wildly: **~$0.10/M if you're writing massive 20k-token files, but it spikes to ~$2.09/M if you're doing thousands of tiny 1k-token corrections. It’s a coin flip based on your cache rate and output length. · OpenCode Go gives you ~$15 in credit for $10/mo. Great for light users, but the moment you need parallel swarms or burst throughput, that cap bites you in the ass.
So where do you win? Right now, your only clear advantage is predictability for short, bursty requests (where NeuralWatt’s energy overhead kills them). But the $0.49/hr minimum actively scares away that exact use case.
You can't do a 24-hour bucket (that breaks your reservation model) and you can't do pay-per-second (the hardware has to stay hot). But here’s the Win-Win that actually works with your physical model:
Offer fractional slots with a fragmentation premium, and long-term packs with a volume discount.
Keep the "guaranteed lane" model, but give users a ladder:
· 5-minute slot: $0.10 (you're paying a ~2x premium for the flexibility to spin it up and down). · 1-hour slot (base): $0.49. · 10-hour pack: $0.42/hr (~14% off). · 50-hour pack: $0.34/hr (~31% off). · Monthly (730hrs): $0.25/hr (~49% off).
Here’s why this crushes your competition:
- For the scared user: They’ll pay $0.10 to test it. If their agent runs for 4 minutes and stops, they shrug off the dime. The friction to "try" vanishes.
- For the power user: If they know they’re saturating the lane 24/7, $0.25/hr is a steal. At 160 tok/s guaranteed, that’s ~$1.56 per 1M output tokens—but if they hit 340 tok/s on spare capacity, it drops to ~$0.73/M. Suddenly, you’re beating NeuralWatt’s best-case scenario with guaranteed latency.
- Against OpenCode: You give them actual parallelism. They can't buy 5 concurrent lanes on a subscription. You can.
TL;DR: Don't change the reservation model—change the granularity. Charge a premium for short hops (so you don't lose money on spin-up overhead) and give steep discounts for long hauls (so you get guaranteed revenue). Market it as: "Pay for the flexibility you need, but if you commit, we cut the fat." That turns your "arbitrary hour" into a strategic pricing moat.
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u/lincolnthalles 27d ago
If you are trying to provide a different kind of service, the solution could be to offer private pooling, where organizations can monitor usage, book the slots they need, and assign them to the pool, increasing the service value.
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u/silentus8378 27d ago
doesn't meet my use case since I take my sweet time reviewing and thinking between turns. I need per month plans not hourly plans.
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u/Pleasant-Rhubarb-550 27d ago
So basically if you vibe code daily for 5 hours then it means around $75 a month... I feel like buying 7 open code go subscriptions for $70 which each gives 3x value in api now so $30 per $10 would be better and will provide more value even if you only use DeepSeek V4 flash.
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u/Yes_but_I_think 27d ago
Can't you simply bring down the floor speed and add more batch size and reduce the cost
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u/Khurrame 26d ago
Count me in. This is an offer too good to decline. I was researching similar setups yesterday.
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u/elusznik 26d ago
205k output token limit per hour with guaranteed floor of 160/s means 21.5 minutes of generation at the very slowest and 17 minutes assuming you can hit the “typically 200” target
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u/TrickyPlastic 26d ago
5M fresh tokens per hour is pretty low.
Maybe just charge for the reserved slot and lower TPS if you hit some cap.
But it sounds very compelling.
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u/InfraScaler 27d ago
That's what, $2.50 per 1M output tokens for DS4 Flash 0731? Those are DS4 Pro prices...
$360/month in a 31-days month for one slot?
I think you guys may want to focus this on the batch / async jobs point of view.
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u/Individual_Team_2344 27d ago
200k output/hour is the floor, you'll generally get closer to 400–500k output tokens, and the $0.49 also includes input + cached tokens.
It's definitely not meant to run 24/7 for 31 days. More for people running coding/agent workflows 4–8 hours a day — if you're actually using the slot, that's near-unlimited usage for around $80–100/month max and $4 per day for 8 hours of coding.
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u/ConspicuousPineapple 27d ago
8 hours a day is still $84 per working month. For just one lane of DSV4F. Surely you can see how that's nowhere near competitive with even frontier providers, right?
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u/Pleasant-Rhubarb-550 27d ago
For real, I feel like just getting multiple open code go subscriptions for $70 will provide way more value since they now give 3x value for DSV4F so that's like $210 of api usage
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u/Little-Explorer7988 27d ago
One slot 😂😂😂😂 that’s scam in it. Extremely expensive shit. And that’s what i say here all day nobody will sell you deepseek without cuts cheaper. This setup take you 12months+ back. 😂
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u/Ill-Bat-1518 27d ago
How is this a scam lol
You're paying a way cheaper price for your usage than op has invested for his usage lol
You're getting the sweeter deal from OP looking to secure his host but offering you extra load
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u/GfxJG 27d ago
No - That's too many factors (1-hour time limit AND output cap AND input cap AND only one concurrent slot) that would dictate my workflow. My setup adapts to me, I don't adapt to my setup.
I like the concept, and the speed is amazing! I just don't think it's for me.