How to buy DeepSeek tokens cheaply

If you burn tokens at scale, the list price is a starting point, not a fact. The same DeepSeek model is sold at the official rate, at a tenth of it during a promotion, and inside subscriptions that meter your $10 as $70. This page is the order of operations.

1. Work out your real burn rate

Cost is dominated by cache reads, not by fresh input. A coding agent re-sends its context every turn, so at a ~95% cache-hit rate the overwhelming majority of your tokens bill at the cache price. If you do not know your cache-hit rate, assume 90% and check the provider's usage page after a week.

2. Decide what you are buying

• Promotional credit — cheapest per token while it lasts, but it can end without notice and bonus credits usually expire.
• Subscription allowance — predictable, capped per window, and usually tied to one harness or model list.
• Official pay-as-you-go — the most expensive per token and the only one with no counterparty risk.

3. Check these four things before you top up

1. 01Does the credit expire? B.AI's bonus credits last 30 days.
2. 02What are the rate caps? Command Code pauses paid models past $14 in 5 hours.
3. 03Is the price per model or per wallet? A 7x headline can be a 2x allowance on the model you actually use.
4. 04Can you withdraw, or is the balance trapped in the platform's own credit unit?

4. The order that usually wins

Start on the official API to measure your true burn and cache-hit rate. Then move the bulk of the traffic to the cheapest promotional route that still has capacity, and keep the official API configured as a fallback for the moment a cap or a promotion ends.

A 20x headline on a capped, expiring bonus is worth less than a boring 7x that renews every month. Do the arithmetic on your own numbers.