DeepSeek
AI-firstAI Chat & Assistants
DeepSeek is a China-based AI lab shipping an unlimited free chat product and a pay-as-you-go API priced well below Western frontier-lab equivalents.
ABOUT DEEPSEEK
OVERVIEW
- Who is it for?
- Developers, technical users, and self-hosters needing low-cost reasoning and coding models via chat, API, or open weights.
- Problem
- Frontier chat and API pricing from Western labs is prohibitive for high-volume coding and reasoning workloads, and closed models cannot be self-hosted for privacy or air-gapped use.
- Solution
- Unlimited free consumer chat and a pay-as-you-go API priced well below Western frontier-lab equivalents, with a 1M token context, thinking and non-thinking modes, and OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible endpoints.
- What makes it unique
- Open-weight V4 models that run self-hosted, API pricing several orders of magnitude below OpenAI or Anthropic with aggressive cache-hit discounts, and dual OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible endpoints for drop-in integration.
KEY FEATURES
- 1M token context window
- 384K maximum output tokens
- Thinking and non-thinking modes
- OpenAI-compatible API endpoint
- Anthropic-compatible API endpoint
- JSON output mode
- Tool calls
- Responses API
- Chat prefix completion (beta)
- FIM completion for code
PRICING PLANS
Every published plan tier. Editorial reasoning about which one to buy lives on our reviews and best-of pages, not here.
Chat (chat.deepseek.com)
Free web and mobile chat interface with thinking mode and search.
Seats: 1
API deepseek-v4-flash
Off-peak $0.22 per 1M input tokens (cache miss), $0.007 cache hit, $0.66 per 1M output tokens; peak rates double.
API deepseek-v4-pro
Off-peak $0.66 per 1M input tokens (cache miss), $0.022 cache hit, $1.98 per 1M output tokens; peak rates double.
COMPANY
- Founded
- 2023
- Headquarters
- Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
- Founders
- Liang Wenfeng
- Employees
- 101-200
- Funding
- $7B Series A (May 2026)
- Publicly traded
- No
Where ZPlatform covers DeepSeek
Covered in
ZPlatform pages that treat this tool as their subject.
Listed as an alternative in
Alternatives pages for other tools where this one appears.
- The 6 ChatGPT Alternatives Actually Worth Switching To
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- The 6 Microsoft Copilot Alternatives That Actually Tell You What You’re Running
- DeepSeek vs ChatGPT on an Impossible Math Question
Mentioned in
Passing mentions in guides and other posts.
- MachineTranslation.com Review 2026: 22 AI Models Tested
- Best AI Affiliate Programs 2026: 89 AI Tools Ranked by Domain Rating
- Best Hugging Face Models: The Complete Ranked List
- Best AI Chrome Extensions: Real Usage Numbers Report
- The 6 Meta AI Alternatives Worth Switching To (Real Assistants, Not Chat Bubbles)
Mentioned across 9 additional ZPlatform resources.
Sources
- DeepSeek API pricing - Pricing page · checked Jul 13, 2026 · may be stale for this field (48 days)