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Ask HN: Which cheap Chinese LLM are you using?

18 points by linzhangrun ↗ HN
In the last one or two months, starting from DeepSeek V4 Pro, there are quite many low-price Chinese models coming out. Their performance looks more or less similar to me: Mimo V2.5 Pro, MiniMax M3, and the just released GLM 5.2, etc.

Which model are you using now? Why? What are the good and bad parts?

9 comments

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verdverm
DeepSeek v4 let's me do more with my quota

cheap, fast, not as good, but more gets done without giving Big Ai any more money

zionsati
deepseek v4 pro - but honestly it is comparable to gpt-5.4-mini, far from GPT5.4 let alone GPT5.5! Its advantage is really just its pricing. I'm going to give Kimi K2.7 a try - with K2.6, even its cloud chat locks up all the time, so it really didn't give me much confidence at all for agentic coding.
linzhangrun
I think it is more like a post-training issue. DeepSeek is cheap enough for heavy token use, so it fits Hermes very well.
cyanydeez
qwen3.6 35b.

other peoples compute resources are unreliable ar best.

greenoracle9
The main reason I'm using Chinese LLM is cost. Minimax M3 is a good deal with large context window. But, M3 jumps into implementation too quickly even when a task is clearly defined. It misses tests or edge cases, and occasionally lose track during longer work.
jeffyaw
i just use review skills on my sessions/prs extensively until they're in a good place. then coverage skills (which add test coverage).

i built in skills to work with M3 in a service called typed, an ai cli. it uses m3 under the hood (up to ~500k tokens), then switches to deepseek for up to 1M. a few bells and whistles added of typescript/python coding optimization. and just built a custom TUI frontend for it (initially works with the claude code tui and still does).

to toggle the typed tui you can run:

typed cli on

typed cli off

rubslopes
I was going back and forth between kimi k2.6 and deepseek v4 pro, but it's been 2 weeks that I've been using deepseek alone. It's very good and very cheap, I pay the opencode go $10 subscription and don't have to worry about quotas.