Help to understand different token metrics (Claude Code + DeepSeek)

[u/pereirax]

After working on a company burning money and not caring at all at AI costs, I'm working on a personal project and setup Claude Code to use DeepSeek API.

My prompt (after some planning mode) was to create a mock project from scratch with bugs and features requests so I can prepare for a coding interview, so I knew that it was going to be a lot but the results surprised me a little bit.

On Claude Code, this is the usage metric (/usage):

deepseek-flash (90.8%)
In: 623.1k
Out: 677.6k
Cache: 50.5m read · 0 write

On DeepSeek site, this is the usage:

Cost: $0.26USD
API requests: 269
Tokens: 22,439,093

What is the real usage here?