DeepSeekdeepseek.com ↗

Free AI chatbot (web, iOS, Android) from Chinese lab DeepSeek, offering its flagship models, currently V4.1 Flash, at no cost, plus one of the cheapest developer APIs.

Pick it for a fully free, capable reasoning chatbot with no subscription, for a very cheap high-volume API, or when you need open weights you can run yourself.

Avoid for sensitive/confidential data (China-based service, trains on inputs by default) or if you need image/video generation and rich voice features.

No paid consumer tier to buy priority or higher limits; inputs used for model training unless you opt out; service can throttle at peak demand; the API's cheapest rates apply off-peak only; self-hosting a 552B model needs serious hardware.

Privacy policy: inputs used to train and improve the technology by default; opt-out via privacy@deepseek.com ().

• free tier

  The chat product (chat.deepseek.com and the DeepSeek app) is free, including the newest flagship model, V4.1 Flash; no usage caps published.

  DeepSeek official site · checked 2026-09-16

• pricing

  No paid chat plan, chat is free. Paid offering is the usage-based API. Published table, USD per 1M tokens: deepseek-flash $0.15-$0.30 input on a cache miss, $0.003-$0.006 on a cache hit, $0.60-$1.20 output; deepseek-v4-pro $0.66-$1.32, $0.022-$0.044 cache hit, $1.98-$3.96 output. Off-peak rates are half of peak; peak is 01:00-04:00 and 06:00-10:00 UTC, Monday to Friday.

  DeepSeek API pricing · checked 2026-09-16

• data handling

  Privacy policy: inputs used to train and improve the technology by default; opt-out via privacy@deepseek.com ().

  Official data-handling statement · checked 2026-07-29

• open weights

  DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash weights are published on Hugging Face under the MIT licence: a 552B-parameter Causal Encoder-Decoder mixture-of-experts activating 8B parameters per token at prefill and 16B at decode, with a context window of up to one million tokens and image-and-text input. Deployment documented for vLLM, SGLang and Transformers.

  DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash model card · checked 2026-09-16