What DeepSeek is best at
- Anyone who wants frontier-class answers for $0
- Startups routing high-volume API calls on a budget
- Coders who want near-frontier ability without a subscription
Where it isn’t the answer
Sensitive topics and polished consumer experience — the app is functional, not delightful, and it is a China-based service; judge your data accordingly.
Plans & pricing
FreeFull chat access at no cost
APIRoughly $0.14 per million input tokens (est.)
The story so far
- 2024DeepSeek emerges from quant-fund research
- Jan 2025R1 shocks the field: open reasoning at a fraction of the price
- 2026V4 generation holds the line as the value benchmark
Questions people actually ask
Is DeepSeek really free?
Yes — chat is free, and the API is priced at a level that rounds to free for most personal use (~$0.14 per million input tokens, est.).
Is DeepSeek safe to use?
For general questions and code, millions use it happily. It is a China-based service — for sensitive personal or business data, apply the same judgment you would to any overseas cloud.
How is it so cheap?
Aggressive efficiency research — mixture-of-experts designs and training innovations that cut compute cost dramatically, then pricing to win the market.