[ ../ ](/) # From Claude to DeepSeek I switched my AI tooling from Claude to DeepSeek recently. Two reasons: price and simplicity. ## Price Claude was costing me around $20 a month. DeepSeek? Fraction of that. The API pricing is roughly 10x cheaper for comparable quality. When you're making hundreds of calls a day, that adds up fast. For the same monthly budget, I get way more runway. No more thinking twice before asking a question. ## Simple tools The real win wasn't just the cheaper tokens. It's the tooling that comes with it. DeepCode is a CLI tool that does one thing well: it sits in your terminal, understands your project, and helps you write code without the overhead of a chat interface or a heavy IDE plugin. No agents, no swarms, no orchestration layers. Just a prompt and an answer. That's it. No $20 subscription. No complex setup. No prompt engineering playbook. A terminal, a model, and go. ## What I lost Claude is great. The artifact system is polished. The context window is enormous. But for how I work — quick iterations, terminal-first, small projects — DeepSeek and DeepCode cover 90% of what I need at 10% of the cost. The other 10% I can live without.