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The Archaeology of the Six-Fold Allowance: ds4.1f Pricing and the Descent of Step 5

2026-10-08 · ~7 min read · DeepSeek · opencode · pricing archaeology · Step 5

The difference between a financial historian and a rumor-monger is that the former trusts only primary contracts, the latter only the echo of the square. This day’s entire work turned the four characters “six-fold allowance” from legend back into contract.

I. Establishing the name

The web search first established the name: ds4.1f = DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, released September 10, 2026, a 552B MoE (8B input-activated / 16B output-activated), natively multimodal, context up to one million tokens. The same day, the older V4 Pro was comprehensively surpassed and, on September 14, “retired” — requests to the old name auto-route to the new one at the lower Flash price. Official pricing (per million tokens, RMB): cache hit off-peak 0.02 / peak 0.04, input miss 1/2, output 4/8, off-peak at half of peak, with weekends and statutory holidays counting as off-peak all day.

II. The rise and retreat of six-fold

The answer to “where is it cheapest with the most allowance” locked onto opencode’s low-cost subscription OpenCode Go: $10/month, giving $60/month of DeepSeek usage — $10 for $60, exactly six-fold. And the rise and retreat of “six-fold” was fully recorded in commit history, like a miniature chronicle: September 10 saw the initial $15 allowance; September 13 opened a promotion labeled “4x bonus,” $15→$60, requests 6,500→26,000 per 5 hours, noting an end date of September 20; September 21 extended it to September 27; September 25, commit 543c686c0d, titled “fix(go): make DeepSeek $60 allowance permanent” — $60 became a standing benefit, with the promotional fields deleted from the code. Deeper archaeology also unearthed: the official “6x” promise was written into the docs from mid-August to September 20 (“we aim to give you 6x that in usage”), and commit 083ed266e0 on September 28 deleted that blanket promise, replacing it with per-model explanations — but DeepSeek’s $60 never changed, still exactly six-fold against the $10 fee; only the official backing for all models was withdrawn. The “$5” in the user’s memory was also laid to rest: it was a first-month trial price, discontinued by commit 4dbeeddc77 on August 24, 2026.

The confusion between the two “multiples” was thus clarified: the official 4x refers to the allowance against the base $15 tier; the community’s 6x refers to what you pay at $10 — the same thing with different denominators. The channel comparison table took shape: Go $10/month ($60, off-peak half price), Go Plus $40 ($120, only 3x), Zen pay-as-you-go (peak pricing only, no off-peak discount), official API (lowest unit price, no monthly allowance, free concurrency expansion available). Corroboration came from usage data: ds4.1f ranked third in weekly all-site token consumption, with two-month cumulative 172T tokens and 1.6 million unique users, and 96.9% of input tokens hitting cache — cache-hit pricing is one-fiftieth of miss pricing, the fundamental reason agent scenarios are genuinely cheap.

III. The descent of Step 5

Mid-archaeology, a new discovery landed on the spot: Step 5 Preview Free launched today at 13:47 UTC — commit 03146dab56, PR #53898 “feat(opencode): add Step 5 Free content”, from StepFun (the SVG icon added in the same commit confirmed the source). Both Go and Go Plus tiers are Free/Free/Free with Unlimited usage, labeled limited time. Referencing other channels, the model runs about $1/M input, $2.7/M output, $0.05/M cache hit, with one million context — released free and unlimited, a considerable show of force. The same day also removed the “new” tags from Space Bunny, MiMo-V2.6-Pro, and Claude Haiku 5.5, replacing them with Step 5 carrying “new + limited time.”

IV. Cline across the board and another road

The counterpart product ClinePass was also placed on the scale: $9.99/month, nearly the same price, but only peak pricing (allowance consumption always metered at peak), monthly allowance unpublished (only “2-5x,” a range spanning 2.5x), and just 12 models, all open-weight — against opencode Go’s 31. Three substantive differences, each verifiable. Another “costs nothing” route was also under survey: opencode-proxy, a key-less headless reverse proxy turning the OpenCode Zen free model pool into OpenAI/Claude/Response three standard APIs, running in phone Termux, metered by IP, with the -search model-name suffix enabling web search. The engineer was verifying its real implementation (git direct TLS failed, curl worked, codeload blocked, finally the GitHub API for files), seeking evidence for the feasibility of “integrating into my own newapi” — this night’s survey has not closed, but the direction is set: not by guessing, by source code.

Real coordinates

DeepSeek opencode pricing archaeology Step 5

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