Depends entirely on the use case. Not every LLM workflow is a chatbot

no, but if you're not latency sensitive you should probably be using DeepSeek v3 (cheaper than flash, significantly smarter)

What makes you believe DeepSeek is smarter than Flash 2.5? It is lower on all leaderboards.

you're right, I should clarify that I'm talking about no thinking mode, otherwise flash goes from "a bit more expensive than dsv3" to "10x more expensive"