Some china proxies charge as little as 1 cent / Mio tokens for luna, which I use. As far as I know they bundle multiple codex subscriptions to get subsidized token pricings, so in codex it should be.

You'd have to compare against something like the OpenCode Go subscription, and I'm fairly sure deepseek napkins out cheaper in that scenario

I'm still not sure, there's a promo going on now, but generally Go gives $60 of API credit and right now it might be $120 with deepseek. But $20/month OpenAI subscription I believe gives you many hundreds of API-equivalent usage? I've heard $100/month giving many thousands API-equivalent per month.

Everything is cheaper if using a subscription, but some applications require API usage.