DeepSeek V4 Flash · Community source · Personal experience
A Hermes Agent user seeks a cheaper alternative after the V4 price increase, focusing on quality, speed, caching, and free quotas; the post contains no uniform candidate test.
Unverified: the original source could not be rechecked. Historical figures below are not current verified results.
After DeepSeek V4's price increase, the author looked for a cheaper alternative model that works with Hermes Agent:
"After DeepSeek V4's price increase, I'm looking for a cheaper model that I can use with Hermes Agent. I previously… This is a necessary excerpt; read the original source for full context.
u/sullenisme (50 points): "dsv4f is still the best choice"
u/rexxa66: "I use Xiaomi MiMo to run Hermes, and it's about the same as DS's pricing before the increase"
u/analoghumanoid: "You could consider hy3"
u/Silly_Ad6115: "For the Hermes model, select Laguna (free) first; add all free models as fallbacks; once you've used up the free quota, choose DeepSeek... Basically, use up the free options before touching your balance"
u/iShNoo: Shared a prompt that makes Hermes research the pricing of all Nous Research LLMs and generate an MD report (for a weekly cron price-monitoring job)
After the price increase, users began looking for alternatives, but the community consensus remains that DeepSeek V4 Flash offers the best value ("dsv4f is still the best option")
Alternative candidates include Xiaomi MiMo, Tencent Hy3, and free models (such as Laguna) used as a fallback combination
This reflects that the "price increase" was one of the topics the community focused on most in August 2026
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Reddit r/hermesagent · u/Necessary-Refuse-914 · Original publication date Unknown · Site edit date 2026-09-20
Open original sourceDeepSeek V4 Flash
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