Check cache hits in your logs. You can use Openrouter or pi config to pin providers with best cache hit rates (or disable ones with the worst).

I use Openrouter for everything except Deepseek. For Deepseek I use their API directly.

There is a 3rd party harness specifically tuned for deepseek (reasonix). Have you tried that?

what exactly do they do to "tune" it? It's not Deepseek's official harness, and going direct with deepseek using ur own harness is stupid cheap

I can highly recommend OpenCode Go.

I use it from pi.dev as well through the OpenCode Go $10 subscription ($5 first month).

Used more than 20M tokens at a cost of ~$20 (up to $60 is included in the $5 plan) Out of which deepseek pro had ~200 messages which is around 1.5M tokens (10+M cached)

BTW the quotas for Go have very recently changed, now only $15 for some models instead of $60. Which is not actually a difference for DS4 Pro, because they lowered the token pricing 4x at the same time (to match the change in official pricing from DeepSeek months ago)

It is great when the task is medium, but with complex tasks Opus 4.8 is better

You can directly from https://platform.deepseek.com/

I use it through OpenRouter via Kilo Code VS Code extension.

You can check the logs in OpenRouter and see which providers it used and how many tokens you used.

sounds like a caching issue, and maybe other issues too

Why do you even need openrouter as a middle man?