DeepSeek Chat
★ TOP- Category
- Chat & assistants · Chatbots & LLMs
- In one sentence
- The Chinese AI that rattled Wall Street: free, open and dirt-cheap for developers, with privacy small print.
- Free plan
- ✓ Yes
- Price
- Free · API from $0.15/M tokens
- Plans and pricing
- Web chat and app €0
- API · deepseek-flash (V4.1-Flash) $0.30 / $1.20 per million tokens (input / output, peak)
- API · deepseek-v4-pro $1.32 / $3.96 per million tokens (peak)
- API · Search / Fetch $0.75 per 1,000 requests
- AIAO score
- 96/100 best
- Member rating
- Not enough ratings yet
- Languages
- No verified data
- Where to use it
- Web, iOS, Android and API; DeepSeek Harness (developer preview).
- Pros
- Free web chat and apps, no subscription.
- Open weights under the MIT licence: run it on your own server without sending anything to China.
- One of the cheapest APIs: Flash at $0.30 / $1.20 per million tokens at peak and half off-peak.
- 1M-token context and an API compatible with OpenAI and Anthropic formats.
- Cons
- Sensitive privacy: data in China and no simple training toggle.
- Censorship on sensitive political topics.
- Regulatory blocks and complaints (Italy, Germany, consumer groups) and very fast model changes in the API.
- Use cases
- Developers and companies wanting a powerful API at the lowest cost; students and curious users who want a free assistant for non-sensitive data; teams that prefer to deploy an open model on their own infrastructure.
- If you use the API for long jobs (summarising hundreds of documents, batch translation), schedule them off-peak and pay half. For personal or company data, run the open model locally or with a European provider.
- Privacy and data
- Its policy (February 2026) says data is collected and stored in China and what you type may be used for training; opting out is by email and there is an EU representative. Alternative: its open models run locally or with a European provider.