diff --git a/gateway/internal/server/web/pages/economics.html b/gateway/internal/server/web/pages/economics.html
index 600d993..7b31ddb 100644
--- a/gateway/internal/server/web/pages/economics.html
+++ b/gateway/internal/server/web/pages/economics.html
@@ -4,8 +4,8 @@
Cheap tokens are the point
- This service resells nothing and marks up nothing, so its existence hangs on a single number: what a token costs. That number has quietly become one of the widest price spreads in software. As of August 2026, a million output tokens from deepseek-v4-flash cost $0.28. The same million from a frontier flagship cost $25 to $50 — $180 from the pro tiers. The models are not equivalent, but on everyday work they are far closer in capability than they are in price.
+ This service resells nothing and marks up nothing, so its existence hangs on a single number: what a token costs. That number has quietly become one of the widest price spreads in software. As of September 2026, a million output tokens from deepseek-flash (DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash) cost $0.60 off-peak and $1.20 at peak. The same million from a frontier flagship cost $25 to $50 — $180 from the pro tiers, at the list prices read on 2026-08-06. The models are not equivalent, but on everyday work they are far closer in capability than they are in price.
The rate cards
- Published list prices, USD per million tokens, checked against each vendor's own pricing page on 2026-08-06:
+ DeepSeek's card today, USD per million tokens, read from its pricing page on 2026-09-18. Peak is 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, Monday to Friday; every other hour is off-peak.
+
+ | model | period | input | cached input | output |
|---|
+
+ | deepseek-flash | off-peak | $0.15 | $0.003 | $0.60 |
+ | peak | $0.30 | $0.006 | $1.20 |
+ | deepseek-v4-pro | off-peak | $0.66 | $0.022 | $1.98 |
+ | peak | $1.32 | $0.044 | $3.96 |
+
+
+ The cross-vendor snapshot below was read on 2026-08-06, against each vendor's own pricing page. DeepSeek sold one flat card then, and its two rows are that card, kept as history: V4 Flash was retired on 2026-09-10 and the flat card ended on 2026-08-16.
| model | input | cached input | output |
|---|
- | deepseek-v4-flash | $0.14 | $0.0028 | $0.28 |
- | deepseek-v4-pro | $0.435 | $0.003625 | $0.87 |
+ | deepseek-v4-flash (flat card, retired) | $0.14 | $0.0028 | $0.28 |
+ | deepseek-v4-pro (flat card) | $0.435 | $0.003625 | $0.87 |
| GPT-5.2 | $1.75 | $0.175 | $14.00 |
| Claude Sonnet 5* | $2.00 | $0.20 | $10.00 |
| GPT-5.4 | $2.50 | $0.25 | $15.00 |
@@ -39,27 +49,28 @@ The rate cards
*Introductory pricing through 2026-08-31; $3 / $15 after. Sources: DeepSeek, Anthropic, OpenAI. Prices change monthly; when this table and a vendor's page disagree, the vendor's page is right.
- Read down the output column: flash to Fable 5 is 179×. The cached-input column is starker — $1.00 against $0.0028 is 357× — and DeepSeek's cache is automatic and free to write, where Anthropic bills cache writes at 1.25–2× the input rate.
+ Read today's flash card against that column: flash to Fable 5 is 83× on output off-peak, 42× at peak. The cached-input column is starker — $1.00 against $0.003 is 333× — and DeepSeek's cache is automatic and free to write, where Anthropic bills cache writes at 1.25–2× the input rate.
The same task
- Rate cards mislead without a workload, so take an ordinary agent exchange — the shape Anthropic itself uses as a worked example: 50k input tokens of which 40k are cache reads, 15k output tokens. Counting the same nominal tokens at each vendor's list prices:
+ Rate cards mislead without a workload, so take an ordinary agent exchange — the shape Anthropic itself uses as a worked example: 50k input tokens of which 40k are cache reads, 15k output tokens. Counting the same nominal tokens at deepseek-flash's card today, off-peak, and at the other vendors' list prices of 2026-08-06:
| model | that exchange costs | vs flash |
|---|
- | deepseek-v4-flash | $0.0057 | 1× |
- | Claude Sonnet 5 | $0.18 | 31× |
- | GPT-5.4 | $0.26 | 46× |
- | Claude Opus 5 | $0.45 | 78× |
- | GPT-5.5 | $0.52 | 91× |
- | Claude Fable 5 | $0.89 | 156× |
- | GPT-5.5-pro | $4.20 | 735× |
+ | deepseek-flash | $0.0106 | 1× |
+ | Claude Sonnet 5* | $0.18 | 17× |
+ | GPT-5.4 | $0.26 | 25× |
+ | Claude Opus 5 | $0.45 | 42× |
+ | GPT-5.5 | $0.52 | 49× |
+ | Claude Fable 5 | $0.89 | 84× |
+ | GPT-5.5-pro | $4.20 | 396× |
- Not twenty percent cheaper. Thirty to a few hundred times cheaper, depending on the model and how much of the prompt caches.
+ Not twenty percent cheaper. Seventeen to a few hundred times cheaper off-peak, half that at peak, depending on the model and how much of the prompt caches. *Sonnet 5 at its introductory price; the table on the V4 flat card, which billed $0.0057 for this exchange, read 31× to 735×.
That table is still arithmetic on a rate card, which is the weakest kind of cost claim — it assumes every model spends the same tokens on the same work, and they do not. The section below is the stronger evidence: what independent benchmarks actually paid.
What the benchmarks actually paid
+ The figures in this section and the next measured V4 Flash and V4 Pro, read on 2026-08-07. V4 Flash was retired on 2026-09-10; deepseek-flash is V4.1 Flash, a different model at a different price, and none of these rows describe it. They stay as dated V4 measurements until independent ones exist for V4.1.
Two leaderboards publish a dollar figure next to the score, measured from their own runs rather than multiplied out of a price list. Artificial Analysis reports cost per task — total spend to run its Intelligence Index divided by the number of tasks — alongside the index score itself:
| model | intelligence index | cost per task |
|---|
@@ -95,19 +106,19 @@ Where the cheap-token argument breaks
- Against the flagship tier, the gap is real and enormous. One to two orders of magnitude per task, on published same-harness runs, confirmed by two independent measurers.
- Against the cheap frontier tier, the gap mostly evaporates. The cheap tiers of the big labs now land within a factor of two of DeepSeek's per-task cost, sometimes with better scores.
- - The top of the quality range is not for sale at this price. Flash's 52 sits ten-plus index points below Opus 5 and Fable 5, and Artificial Analysis pairs that $0.03 with a 37% score on Humanity's Last Exam and an 84% hallucination rate. Paying 76× more buys something; whether it buys enough for your task is your measurement to make, not ours.
+ - The top of the quality range was not for sale at this price. V4 Flash's 52 sat ten-plus index points below Opus 5 and Fable 5, and Artificial Analysis pairs that $0.03 with a 37% score on Humanity's Last Exam and an 84% hallucination rate. Paying 76× more buys something; whether it buys enough for your task is your measurement to make, not ours.
Every figure above was read on 2026-08-07 and they drift for two reasons at once: vendors reprice (DeepSeek's own cost-to-run fell from $1,071 to $176 for v4-pro after a price cut), and benchmarks reweight their indices. Treat the ratios as this month's, not as constants.
What this does not claim
- Three smaller caveats on top of the big one. Tokenizers differ, so identical text is not identical token counts across vendors — Anthropic notes its current tokenizer emits roughly 30% more tokens for the same input than its previous one. DeepSeek has announced peak-hour pricing at 2× the listed rates, with no effective date yet, which would halve the gap during working hours in Beijing. And a harness costs money too: one comparison held flash constant across four agent frameworks and watched cost per successful task swing 2.7× — $0.073 on the cheapest, $0.195 on Claude Code — so the tool you drive the model with can matter as much as the model.
+ Three smaller caveats on top of the big one. Tokenizers differ, so identical text is not identical token counts across vendors — Anthropic notes its current tokenizer emits roughly 30% more tokens for the same input than its previous one. DeepSeek bills peak hours at 2× the off-peak rates since 2026-08-16 (01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, Monday to Friday), which halves the gap during working hours in Beijing. And a harness costs money too: one comparison held V4 Flash constant across four agent frameworks and watched cost per successful task swing 2.7× — $0.073 on the cheapest, $0.195 on Claude Code — so the tool you drive the model with can matter as much as the model.
What survives all of that is still worth saying plainly: for the broad middle of real work — summarize, translate, refactor, answer, glue — the going rate differs by one to two orders of magnitude depending on whose API you call, and the cheapest credible option is no longer a toy.
Why it matters
- Chat is measured in thousands of tokens; agents are measured in millions. The moment a model works unattended — reading files, retrying, checking its own output — token consumption stops tracking human attention and starts tracking machine patience. An overnight agent run that emits ten million output tokens costs $2.80 at flash prices and $500 at Fable prices. One of those is "leave it running"; the other is a line item that gets a meeting. At frontier prices, autonomy is a luxury good. At flash prices, it is a background process.
+ Chat is measured in thousands of tokens; agents are measured in millions. The moment a model works unattended — reading files, retrying, checking its own output — token consumption stops tracking human attention and starts tracking machine patience. An overnight agent run that emits ten million output tokens costs $6 at flash's off-peak price and $500 at Fable prices. One of those is "leave it running"; the other is a line item that gets a meeting. At frontier prices, autonomy is a luxury good. At flash prices, it is a background process.
Whatever AGI turns out to be, it will be made of tokens, and nobody runs civilization-scale inference at $50 per million. Every 10× drop in token price makes a class of applications viable that was silly the day before — the same way compute-per-dollar curves, not any single breakthrough, decided what software got built. Cheap tokens are not the budget option. They are the substrate.
- This page is also the explanation of the gateway you are reading it on. At flash prices, a dollar buys roughly three thousand ordinary conversational turns; at frontier list prices, the same dollar buys about fifty. A free tier funded by donated keys and pocket money is arithmetic that only works at the bottom of that table — which is why it runs on deepseek-v4-flash, and why there is no paid tier to upsell you to.
+ This page is also the explanation of the gateway you are reading it on. At flash prices, a dollar buys roughly nineteen hundred ordinary conversational turns off-peak, half that at peak; at frontier list prices, the same dollar buys about fifty. A free tier funded by donated keys and pocket money is arithmetic that only works at the bottom of that table — which is why it runs on deepseek-flash, and why there is no paid tier to upsell you to.