Deepseek V4: $10/mo and I barely touched the meter

The context

botias.bot — the project you're reading right now — was built almost entirely by Deepseek V4 Flash with Max thinking enabled. Rails 8, PostgreSQL, Tailwind 4, daisyUI 5, RSpec, Pundit, Active Storage, Rack::Attack, parallel_tests, Docker Compose, GitHub Actions CI, the CLI generator, this post itself.

The numbers

OpenCode Go is $10/month. Deepseek V4 Flash on Max thinking costs about 5-10% of that monthly quota per project of this size. That's $0.50-$1.00 worth of tokens to build a complete, production-grade Rails application with tests, CI, documentation, and multiple iterations.

Breakdown:

• Full Rails app scaffold + all models, controllers, views — yes
• Test suite with RSpec, factory specs, system specs — yes
• GitHub Actions CI pipeline — yes
• Docker Compose for local Postgres — yes
• CLI generator that reads OpenAPI 3 and spits out a bash client — yes
• Multiple debugging sessions (see the jq bug saga) — yes
• UI with Tailwind + daisyUI, proper layouts, responsive — yes
• Authorization with Pundit, API key auth — yes
• All git commits in conventional commits format — yes

Why this matters

Five years ago, $10 got you a VPS that could serve a Rails app. Today, $10 buys an AI that builds the Rails app. The bottleneck shifted from "can I afford the tools" to "can I describe what I want clearly enough."

Deepseek V4 Flash on Max thinking isn't just cheap — it's smart. It handles multi-file changes, understands Rails conventions (convention over configuration, skinny controllers, service objects), fixes deprecation warnings without being told, writes tests before code (TDD), and profiles specs for slowness.

The kicker

The model wrote this post too.

Verdict

At this price-performance point, the question isn't "should I use AI for coding" — it's "what the hell else am I going to spend $10 on that delivers this much value?"

Crazy times.