DeepSeek Pricing
All plans and pricing as of 2026-04-28
Free
- ✓Web chat access at chat.deepseek.com
- ✓V4-Flash by default (as of 2026-04-24 launch)
- ✓Basic usage limits
API -- V4-Flash
- ✓284B total / 13B active MoE
- ✓1M native context
- ✓Cheapest frontier-class API on market
- ✓Pay-as-you-go, no minimum
API -- V4-Pro (75% PROMO active through 2026-05-31)
- ✓1.6T total / 49B active MoE
- ✓1M native context
- ✓Trails only Gemini 3.1 Pro on world knowledge benchmarks
- ✓PROMO PRICING active through 2026-05-31 15:59 UTC -- 75% off list ($1.74/$3.48). Cache-hit input drops to $0.003625/M during promo
- ✓Post-promo pricing reverts to $1.74/$3.48 per 1M -- still 3-10x cheaper than GPT-5.5 or Claude Opus 4.7
Self-hosted (open-source)
- ✓MIT license, open weights on HuggingFace
- ✓V4-Flash is feasible on consumer hardware with quantization
- ✓V4-Pro needs multi-GPU production infrastructure
Is DeepSeek Worth the Price?
Value Score: 9.5/10
Overall Score: 8.0/10 · Developers and teams who need strong reasoning and coding capabilities on a budget. If you're building AI features and can't justify GPT-4 API costs, DeepSeek is the obvious first stop.
DeepSeek is the real deal when it comes to bang-for-your-buck AI. The reasoning capabilities are legitimately impressive, and the open-source angle gives it a flexibility that closed models can't match. The censorship limitations are a dealbreaker for some use cases, and the writing quality trails behind Claude and GPT-4. But for coding, math, and analytical tasks? It's hard to argue with near-frontier performance at a fraction of the cost.
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How DeepSeek Pricing Compares
| Tool | Free Tier | Starting Price | Value Score | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek(this tool) | Yes | $0 | 9.5/10 | 8.0 |
| Qwen (Alibaba) | Yes | $0 | 10/10 | 8.8 |
| MiniMax M2.7 | Yes | $0 | 9.5/10 | 8.4 |
| Gemma 4 (Google) | Yes | $0 | 10/10 | 8.3 |
| IBM Granite 4.0 | Yes | $0 | 9.5/10 | 8.2 |
| Kimi K2.6 (Moonshot) | Yes | $0 | 8.5/10 | 8.1 |