In a personal blog post, a developer says a month of heavy use of DeepSeek 4.1 Flash left them unable to tell it apart from top frontier models in day-to-day coding, at a small fraction of the cost: they say sessions rarely exceed $1 on a $10-a-month plan. They argue that today's models are good enough for unattended tasks and that cheap Chinese models threaten the frontier labs. It is one user's experience, not a benchmark.