DeepSeek

Free

By AI Bookmarks Editorial Team, Directory editors Last reviewed 2026-10-23

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DeepSeek's free chat assistant, built on open-weight models and aimed at reasoning and coding work. No paid consumer tier; responses can queue at peak times.

Quick facts

Pricing	Free
Free tier	Yes — the chat app is free, with no paid tier to unlock
Platforms	Web, iOS, Android
Developer	DeepSeek
Website	https://chat.deepseek.com

What DeepSeek is

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company that publishes open-weight large language models and ships them through a free chat assistant at chat.deepseek.com, plus iOS and Android apps. You ask a question in plain language and it answers in text, with a reasoning mode that shows its working before the final answer. It is used most for maths, coding, and document analysis, and it can read uploaded files and images. Unlike most Western chatbots there is no consumer subscription: the chat app is free, and money is made from the developer API instead, which is billed per token. The models are released with downloadable weights, so they can also be run on your own hardware. Two limits worth knowing: the service is closed at the account level even though the weights are open, and demand is high enough that peak hours can be slow or rate-limited. Treat it as a working tool for reasoning-heavy tasks rather than a source of record, and check anything that matters against a primary source.

Best for

Maths and logic problems where seeing the reasoning steps helps
Coding questions, including explaining why an algorithm works
Summarising long documents you upload in a session

Not ideal for

Workflows that depend on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 add-ons
Answers you need to cite without cross-checking a primary source

Pros

Free to use, with no subscription needed to reach the full model
Reasoning mode exposes its steps, which makes errors easier to spot
Open weights mean the models can be self-hosted or inspected

Cons

Peak-hour demand can slow responses or trigger rate limits
Fewer integrations and plugins than the major US chatbots
Can still state wrong facts confidently, so output needs checking

Pricing in detail

The consumer chat app is free and has no paid tier — there is nothing to unlock by paying. Paid usage applies to the developer API, which is billed per token with separate input and output rates; check the official API pricing page for current numbers, since they change. Third-party hosted versions of the same models are priced independently of DeepSeek.