u/Existing_Arrival_702

I have been using DeepSeek V4 for coding tasks through both OpenRouter and the official DeepSeek platform. Today, I checked the OpenRouter logs and noticed that the provider for the DeepSeek model was not DeepSeek itself, but NovitaAI and SiliconFlow instead.

Now I am wondering whether these providers deliver the same quality as the original DeepSeek service or if the quality is degraded in some way.

If the quality is identical or even slightly worse, I feel like I might stop using OpenRouter and just use DeepSeek directly instead. After all, DeepSeek is the company that actually created the model, while other providers are essentially hosting it and making money from it. I would rather have that revenue go directly to DeepSeek so their team has more resources to continue improving the model.

What do you guys think?

https://preview.redd.it/djh7svtv03zg1.png?width=1271&format=png&auto=webp&s=1514e5d55f381713eb6310359719694b50bf629e

Today I tried using DeepSeek V4 Flash for about half a day for coding through OpenChamber. I have seen a lot of praise for OpenChamber on Reddit recently, so I wanted to give it a try.

My task was fullstack, including planning and TDD for the backend and React for the frontend without unit tests.

Here are the results after half a day
Total tokens used: 58.6M
Total cost: 0.384 USD

The reason I am testing DeepSeek is that GitHub Copilot will increase its pricing next month. I am still not used to OpenChamber. The interface feels more cluttered compared to GitHub Copilot. The model reasoning output also floods the chat instead of being collapsed, which makes it harder to follow the actual answers.

DeepSeek V4 Flash sometimes does not follow my instructions. I created a custom agent called C# TDD for backend work and set it as the main agent, but sometimes it writes TDD and sometimes it does not.

I still prefer the GitHub Copilot interface, but integrating DeepSeek into Copilot is not very smooth. The context window tracking feature does not seem to work properly.

On the DeepSeek homepage, they mention thinking modes like none, high, and max, but OpenCode does not expose these variants, so I am not sure what reasoning level I am actually using.

Until now I have been using Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT 5.4 for programming tasks. Currently each prompt only costs one premium request. I am honestly not fully confident switching to DeepSeek yet.

What are your experiences?