According to DynoBeat monitoring, after the official release of DeepSeek V4 Flash, it quickly experienced a surge in volume. The official API briefly returned a 503 error, indicating the service was overloaded, and advised users to temporarily switch to other large model API providers.
However, switching to a third party may not necessarily be cheaper. DeepSeek's official cache hit price is $0.02 per million tokens, while Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Volcano Ark under Byte all charge $0.2, which is 10 times more expensive.
The Agent will repeatedly read the code and context, with token caching often accounting for the vast majority. After moving to a platform with a higher cache hit price, the actual cost will increase significantly.
