Best for: Budget-conscious developers and indie builders, Students and researchers needing math/logic reasoning, Cost-sensitive teams running large API volumes
Updated today
DeepSeek is a free web and mobile AI chat assistant from the Chinese lab of the same name, built on its open-weight V4 mixture-of-experts models. It pairs a fast Instant mode with an Expert reasoning mode (DeepThink/R1-style chain-of-thought), web search, and document analysis, and is aimed at users who want frontier-level reasoning and coding help without a subscription.
Best for: Budget-conscious developers and indie builders • Students and researchers needing math/logic reasoning • Cost-sensitive teams running large API volumes • Engineers who want to self-host open-weight models
| Plan | Details |
|---|---|
| Free | Unlimited free chat on web and mobile: Instant + Expert modes, DeepThink reasoning, web search, file upload, and image vision, with no message caps or ads. API new accounts get ~5M free tokens valid 30 days. |
| Starter | Chat (web/app): Free |
| Pro | API deepseek-v4-flash: $0.14/1M input (cache miss), $0.28/1M output |
Also: API deepseek-v4-pro: $0.435/1M input (cache miss), $0.87/1M output — Verified 2026-06-08 against deepseek.com and api-docs.deepseek.com. No consumer subscription tier exists; legacy model names deepseek-chat/deepseek-reasoner deprecate 2026-07-24.
Toggle DeepThink only for hard math, logic, or code; leave it off for simple questions to avoid 15-60s waits
Turn on the web search toggle whenever the question depends on recent or time-sensitive data
For confidential business, medical, or legal data, self-host the open weights instead of using the hosted chat
Hit API off-peak hours (16:30-00:30 UTC) for additional discounts on top of cache savings
Best for: Budget-conscious developers and indie builders • Students and researchers needing math/logic reasoning • Cost-sensitive teams running large API volumes • Engineers who want to self-host open-weight models
DeepSeek is a freemium AI tool best suited for Budget-conscious developers and indie builders, Students and researchers needing math/logic reasoning.
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