DeepSeek is a Chinese AI research lab whose R1 and V3 models surged to global prominence in early 2025 after demonstrating performance competitive with GPT-4o at a fraction of the training cost. The DeepSeek chatbot is free to use and the models are open-source — making them freely available to run locally or deploy via API.
The consumer chatbot (chat.deepseek.com) is free with no subscription required, offering both the V3 (general reasoning) and R1 (extended chain-of-thought reasoning) models. API access is priced at rates significantly below OpenAI — approximately $0.14/million tokens for V3 input versus $2.50/million for GPT-4o.
DeepSeek's performance on coding and mathematical reasoning tasks is genuinely competitive with frontier models. For developers who primarily need a coding assistant or reasoning model and are sensitive to API costs, it represents significant value. The open-source nature means organisations can host it locally via Ollama or similar tools for full data privacy.
The primary concerns are data privacy (the service is operated by a Chinese company and subject to Chinese data law), reported instances of censorship on politically sensitive topics, and service reliability — DeepSeek's infrastructure has faced outages during peak demand.
