Publishes its models with open weights and charges a fraction of rival API prices.
Price checked 02.11.2026
About the company
DeepSeek grew out of High-Flyer, the Chinese quantitative fund run by Liang Wenfeng, and became a separate company in 2023. In January 2025 its R1 reasoning model topped the App Store in the US and knocked Nvidia shares down on the claim that it cost a fraction of Western models to train. The company publishes open model weights, so anyone can run them on their own servers. The chat is free, and the API charges by token, with half price outside peak hours. User data sits on servers in China, which led Italy's privacy authority to block the app in January 2025.
Sources: api-docs.deepseek.com
What it does
- Free chat on the web and in the app
- Open model weights
- API with off-peak discounts of half price
- A context window of one million tokens
What it costs
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Freemost picked | $0per month | chat on the web and in the app |
| API Flash | on request | $0.30 per 1M input tokens, $1.20 output, peak |
| API V4 Pro | on request | $1.32 per 1M input tokens, $3.96 output, peak |
Worth it?
Stronger
- Free chat with no subscription
- Open weights you can host yourself
Weaker
- User data is stored on servers in China
- Several governments restrict the app on official devices
- Reads files you upload
- Phone app
- Has an API
- Open weights