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.
- #7 in AI Chat & Assistants
- #12 of 120 overall
- 23 pages cover it
- 38 ZPlatform Score
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
Why DeepSeek ranks where it does
Position is earned from coverage across zPlatform, not from a launch date. Every figure below links to the page it came from.
Covered across 23 zPlatform pages
- 1 dedicated page
- 7 listed as an alternatives
- 15 passing mentions
Repeat coverage of the same kind counts less each time, so a tool cannot climb by being name-dropped. The full list of pages is below.
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
- The 6 Kimi Alternatives Worth Testing If The Data Question Is Yours
- The 6 Mistral Alternatives Worth Testing If You Hit The Le Chat Ceiling
- The 6 Grok Alternatives Worth Trying at a Fraction of the Price
- The 6 Gemini Alternatives Worth Testing If Google Isn’t Winning For You
- 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
- 30 Best AI SEO Tools & Software in 2026 (Tested & Ranked)
Mentioned across 10 additional ZPlatform resources.
Sources
- DeepSeek API pricing - Pricing page · checked Jul 13, 2026 · may be stale for this field (61 days)