DeepClaude Lets You Run Claude Code With DeepSeek's Brain for 17x Cheaper

A caller open-source instrumentality called DeepClaude lets developers tally Claude Code—Anthropic's autonomous coding agent—with DeepSeek's exemplary nether the hood.

Pushed to GitHub by a developer going by aattaran, the task bills itself arsenic the aforesaid Claude Code acquisition astatine "17x cheaper." It's a elemental bash and PowerShell publication — thing fancy, nary fork, nary rewrite.

Using the tool, you tin besides tally Claude Code with different backends similar OpenRouter, oregon Fireworks AI—not conscionable DeepSeek, though that’s seemingly the main draw.

The instrumentality is situation variables. Claude Code reads a fistful of them to determine wherever to nonstop API calls. DeepClaude rewrites those for the duration of a session, points them astatine a cheaper backend, past restores the originals erstwhile you exit.

The bid enactment instrumentality itself doesn't change. File reading, editing, bash execution, multi-step instrumentality loops, subagent spawning, each of it inactive works. Only the exemplary doing the reasoning is different.

But the "tool loop" is the full constituent of Claude Code. When you inquire Claude to hole a bug, it doesn't reply successful 1 shot. It reads files, runs commands, sees the output, decides what to bash next, edits something, runs your tests, reads the failures, tries again. So it’s a process that involves thinking, acting, observing, reasoning again, dozens of times, until the occupation is done.

That rhythm is what radical mean by "autonomous cause loop." You springiness 1 instruction, the exemplary takes 30 steps. It's besides the portion that burns done tokens—and done your Anthropic budget.

DeepClaude keeps the loop intact and conscionable swaps which exemplary is making the decisions wrong it.

The mathematics is straightforward. Anthropic's Max 20x plan, which gives dense users afloat Claude Code access, runs $200 a month. DeepSeek V4 Pro done OpenRouter presently costs $0.435 per cardinal input tokens and $0.87 per cardinal output—a promotional complaint that expires May 31, 2026, aft which it doubles. Even astatine afloat price, it's drastically cheaper than Anthropic's API.

By default, DeepClaude routes postulation to DeepSeek V4 Pro, the 1.6 trillion-parameter open-weight AI behemoth exemplary that Hangzhou-based DeepSeek released connected April 24. (Parameters, for the uninitiated, are what find a model’s capacity—the much parameters, the wider the model’s breadth of knowledge.)

DeepSeek V4 Pro scores 93.5% connected LiveCodeBench—a benchmark that runs models connected caller competitory programming problems, meaning DeepSeek solved 93.5% of the tasks—placing it up of some Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Opus 4.6.

Some things are inactive a spot unsmooth astir the edges. Image input doesn't work. DeepSeek's Anthropic-compatible endpoint doesn't enactment vision. Parallel instrumentality calls are disabled. MCP server integrations don't walk through. And connected hard reasoning tasks, the “readme” record itself concedes Claude Opus is inactive stronger.

That said, for reasoning, coding, and originative tasks, this implementation is simply a precise almighty and businesslike solution to use.

A spot of discourse for wherefore this exists: On March 31, Anthropic accidentally shipped Claude Code's afloat root representation to npm, exposing 512,000 lines of TypeScript. The leak triggered a question of clones, Python rewrites, and tools that hook into Claude Code's present well-documented internals.

DeepClaude is the earthy adjacent step. It doesn't fork the code, but it exploits the information that Claude Code's backend is, by design, swappable.

There's besides a "remote control" mode that opens a Claude Code league successful immoderate browser via a claude.ai/code/session_... URL, with DeepSeek inactive doing the exemplary work. That 1 requires a Claude.ai subscription, since Anthropic's WebSocket span is hardcoded.

Whether Anthropic volition attraction is different question. Claude Code is simply a paid product, but the API endpoints are unfastened by design, the institution built them to beryllium Anthropic-compatible for third-party adoption. DeepClaude turns that compatibility outward.

The repo presently sits astatine astir a 1000 stars and 2 forks. DeepSeek's promotional pricing ends May 31.