I'm using hermes and keep close control over open router provider to DSv4 flash 0731

Use only the deepseek provider, you can configure openrouter to do that(but they create some obstacles, go to configurations and allow all providers)

Right now i'm testing deepseek harness, don't wait to test it. The plugin architecture and self awareness of workflows really make you think about "what is a tool vs what is a project".

It has been an amazing experience

They just raised their prices sadly.

Is there actually a difference in cache rates between OR and official API? I have a preset set up on OR so that I only send traffic to deepseek. The preset is important otherwise you will send traffic to different providers but if you weren't doing this already then what can I say, water is wet, of course cache rates will be awful. I get about 70% cache hit rate with the preset which is appropriate for what I'm doing. I haven't used the official API though.

Zenmux say the cache hit rate is 98% for the deepseek flash API. I don't know why, but performance is definitely worse using openrouter.

https://zenmux.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash

Could be compression or metadata in their pipeline adding noise and making requests less generic.

they will train / retain your prompts though, so to me it's not a valid option