On text reasoning and code, V4.1-Flash trades blows with GPT-5.6 far more often than the price gap suggests. Against GPT-6 Astra on hard agentic work, OpenAI still pulls ahead.
Free chat, and $0.15 per million input tokens off-peak - under 4% of GPT-5.6 Sol and 1.5% of GPT-6 Astra. Nothing else at this quality is close.
DeepSeek publishes its weights under the MIT licence. Every OpenAI model is API-only and always will be.
Voice, images, memory, apps, deep research - DeepSeek is a chat box; ChatGPT is a platform.
Near-frontier code assistance without a subscription made DeepSeek the student developer’s default, and the 2026 agent tooling made it usable in real pipelines.
DeepSeek is a China-based service; for sensitive personal or business content, many users prefer OpenAI’s jurisdiction. Judge by your own bar.