1-3 Month apartment rental, what makes more sense? Decent price but has a 1 month deposit or more expensive but no deposit

Hello all, hopefully this is the right subreddit to post my dilemma on

I plan to do a 1-3 month DN trip to Japan, where the length of the stay just depends on how much i enjoy it, and i have been looking at a couple apartment rental / monthly mansion websites.

My top 2 websites so far are, Metro Residences and At-inn, in which both specialise in monthly apartment rentals but they have different approaches for the overall price.

Metro Residences and alot of monthly apartment sites, normally require you to put down 1 month of rent as a 'refundable security deposit', then paying for the month, then after your stay 'you'll get it back after an inspection' but after reading a few threads on Reddit, it seems like getting your deposit back is very unlikely, but me being optimistic that could be experiences from scummy individual landlords or does it extend to companies based around monthly mansions too? where I'm assuming they'll go through alot of Tennants a year.

Then we have At-inn which looks good and requires no deposit, you just get an 'all-in' price, but the prices are abit more expensive

To put it into numbers

A 2 month stay at Metro Residences may cost

1st month + deposit + cleaning fees

¥379,545

2nd month

¥175,610

Grand total: with deposit

¥555,155

Grand total: once you have the deposit back

¥379,545

Where as a 2 month stay at At-inn may cost
¥404,060

And so my question would be, which option would you choose and why? And have you got any experiences where you did or did not get the security deposit back?

(Initially it just makes sense to go with option 1 with the assumption I'll get my money back from the deposit but if i get shafted with the deposit, then option 1 becomes very expensive, it's alot of money to lose, where as option 2, the price is the price, so there's less worry, unless there's other things that might creep into the total cost)

Thanks for reading 🙂