Is DeepSeek consuming tokens faster lately? Seeing strange balance drops
Has anyone else noticed a significant increase in token consumption or cost recently?
In the first few days, I topped up with 10 CNY and it felt like it lasted forever—I was getting through roughly 60-70 million tokens quite comfortably. However, over the last few days, my balance seems to be disappearing way faster than before.
The weird part is that my actual usage (the volume of prompts/replies) has actually decreased, yet the money is draining quicker. Is there a hidden cost I'm missing, or has the tokenization/pricing logic changed?
On the first day, I used nearly three times as many tokens as I did on the following days, but the costs don't seem to reflect that usage accurately.
I'm using it through Claude Code
Posted May 12, 2026, 8:11 AM UTC