After I handed my workspace over to agents in May, my token usage went completely off the rails (see [My Token Usage Exploded 13× in Three Months]). Then DeepSeek raised its prices in August, the official API became genuinely unaffordable, and the only thing left to do was hunt down cheap third parties. So over the past six months I’ve tried pretty much every token plan (monthly or prepaid quota) I could get my hands on — three Chinese cloud vendors and five overseas ones.

This isn’t a recommendation list. It’s just a record of what I ran into: the good parts praised, the painful parts reported as they were.

DeepSeek recently officially raised its prices. As someone whose token usage was closing in on 100M tokens last quarter (see [My Token Usage Exploded 13× in Three Months]), I didn’t pay much attention at first — after all, DeepSeek was already very cheap, and even the raised price was still lower than the official price announced when V4 first launched. But I underestimated my usage: after a day of real-world testing at the new prices, it became clear that the cost is genuinely hard for an individual to bear. If I didn’t find a way around it, I’d be working just to pay for tokens.

When I handed my workspace over to Multica back in May, I was happily picturing how letting AI take on more of the work would mean fewer late nights for me. The work did get done — but my token bill went through the roof. The other day I pulled a three-month usage report for the workspace out of curiosity, and I had to double-check that I was reading it right: about 38M tokens in May, jumping to nearly 500M in July, with a three-month total of 883M. So here’s a data-driven look at how my token consumption exploded over those three months — and why. Because my AI tasks have gone from “trying it out” to “can’t live without it”.