Back to DeepSeek review
Starting at Free
freemium
7.8
Chat
$0
- Web and mobile apps
- Reasoning mode
- Web search
Most Popular
API
Pay-per-token
- Very low per-token rates
- OpenAI-compatible format
- Discounts for cached input
Self-hosted
Free weights
- Open-weight models
- Permissive license
- Run on your own hardware or cloud
Is DeepSeek Worth It?
Pros
- Free chat app with strong reasoning
- Open-weight models you can run or host yourself
- API pricing far below most Western competitors
- Strong at math and coding tasks
- Shows its reasoning steps
Cons
- Data is stored on servers in China
- Banned on government devices in several countries
- Censors politically sensitive topics
- Fewer features than ChatGPT, such as image generation and voice
- Service can be slow or unavailable at peak times