AI & ML
I tested DeepSeek Harness for a week. I left with a shipped plugin and $0 in API costs
Vitaliy Ryumshyn DEV Community
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I tested DeepSeek Harness for a week. I left with a shipped plugin and $0 in API costs
I came to DeepSeek Harness as a reviewer and left as one of its plugin authors,
which is a fair measure of how the week went.
The hook is on the repo's first line: "Everything is a plugin." Not the
usual marketing meaning — not a config file with a couple of third-party hooks.
In DSH the agent hosts its own web UI as plugin packages; the settings screen
where you pick and configure models is assembled from plugin contributions
(this is the part I verified the hard way); even the optional subagents —
Codex, Claude Code — ship as plugins you can add or drop. All of it loaded
through manifests over a real extension API. I've poked at a lot of "extensible" tools. This one takes it literally, and poking at it turned into
the most fun I've had with an agent harness in a while.
The test project: a pricing board inside the harness itself
The gap I kept feeling in Settings → Models was the two questions I ask before
switching providers every time: what does this model actually cost per
million tokens, and is a cheaper route to the same model available? DSH
tells you which models exist. It doesn't tell you what they cost.
dsh-model-pricing closes that, and it lives inside the harness's own
Settings page — because that's the point of testing the plugin system:
per-1M-token input / output / cache prices for 7,178 priced models across
213 providers (models.dev data)
the harness's own routing catalog overlaid for the 788 models it can actually
invoke — where the two sources disagree, the row is flagged with ⚠ rather
than silently averaged
same-model, cross-provider comparison with a cheapest badge: GLM-5.2, say,
runs from $3.08 to $4.84 per 1M output tokens depending on the gateway — the
same model, 57% apart
capability tags (coding / agentic / vision / long context / open weights)
computed from structured catalog fields, with a user-configurable rule engine
subscription plans (Coding Plan, Token Plan) grouped separately and excluded
from per-token ranking
a community promotions feed — the part I most want to tell you about,
below
English + Chinese UI (the platform's) plus a Russian pack the plugin itself
registers
It installs through the harness's own plugin manager — I never forked anything:
npx -y @deepseek-ai/dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-model-pricing
What surprised me: I built it on a free model
Here's the part I didn't expect. I built the whole thing using DeepSeek
Harness, driven by Qwen3.8-Flash through B.AI's current promotion — the one
the plugin itself ships as a record: "Qwen3.8-Flash API at 0 Credits (free),"
with a source link, a verification date and "end not announced" stamped in.
Total LLM spend for the project: $0. Which made the week a perfect loop —
an agent harness, used to build a plugin about the economics of agent
harnesses, on a free model the plugin advertises.
Eight records shipped on day one; one of them describes the free model that
wrote this plugin's UI.
Numbers, since the internet likes them
priced rows / providers
7,178 / 213
harness-catalog overlaid rows
788 (30 disagreements flagged, not averaged)
plan rows grouped & excluded from ranking
175
promo records at launch
8 (each with source URL + verification date)
commits / files / LOC
28 / 18 / ~2,300
wall-clock
~22h, incl. overnight autonomous rounds
LLM cost
$0 — free API promotion, re-verify date 2026-10-10
UI languages
en + zh (platform), ru (plugin)
Try it — as reviewer and as builder
If you're curious about DeepSeek Harness the way I was: run it, then break into
its settings page. The architecture is the product; the agent is very good at
both jobs, even on a model that costs nothing.
npx -y @deepseek-ai/dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-model-pricing
Repo (docs, feature map, the promotion contribution rules — all public):
github.com/vitas/dsh-model-pricing
· npm:
dsh-model-pricing ·
Apache-2.0.
Read original: https://dev.to/vitas/i-tested-deepseek-harness-for-a-week-i-left-with-a-shipped-plugin-and-0-in-api-costs-3d8j
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