DeepSeek more and more sucks for Hermes

We're running an Hermes agent since 6 moths which really became super important for many people in the company. For a long time now we used DeeSeek Flash as the model behind. Initially that worked very well, especially because it was much cheaper and almost as good as Anthropic. However since a couple of weeks user keep on complaining that certain results are not as good as they used to be. The agent keeps on doing obvious mistakes. It's a bit hard to say exactly, but a lot of users confirm this. We haven't touched the model recently. It must have changed somehow. Did anyone has the same experience? What would be alternative to Deepseek Flash (prefferebly with rather less than more costs)?