78
Stack Score
Editorial pick
DeepSeek
Chinese frontier LLM with aggressive pricing.
Try DeepSeek✓ Free trial available
Best for
Cost-sensitive builders who need frontier-level reasoning quality without paying OpenAI or Anthropic API rates.
At a glance
- Pricing
- freemium
- Setup time
- 5 minutes
- Learning curve
- easy
- Last verified
- 5/19/2026
What we love
- ✓Hardest-to-beat price-performance ratio on the API right now
- ✓Open weights mean self-hosting and finetuning are on the table
- ✓R1 reasoning model is genuinely competitive for math and code
Where it falls short
- −Chinese hosting raises compliance questions for some enterprises
- −Outputs sometimes refuse politically sensitive China-related queries
- −Less mature SDK and tooling than OpenAI or Anthropic
Pricing
✓ Pricing verified Jun 21, 20262 tiers
Free chat
$0
web only
- ✓DeepSeek-V3 chat
- ✓R1 reasoning
- ✓No card required
API
From $0.07
per 1M input tokens
- ✓V3 and R1 endpoints
- ✓Cache discounts
- ✓Standard rate limits
Why we picked it
If you're cost-sensitive on the API, DeepSeek's R1 is hard to beat for reasoning.
Overview
DeepSeek-V3 and R1 reasoning models with API pricing 10-20x cheaper than frontier US models. Chat interface is free.
Key features
- ●DeepSeek-V3 and R1 reasoning models — competitive with frontier US models
- ●API pricing roughly 10–20x cheaper than equivalent OpenAI tiers
- ●Web chat free at chat.deepseek.com with no rate-limited signup
- ●Open weights released for V3 and R1 base models
- ●Built-in chain-of-thought reasoning visible in R1 outputs
- ●Cache discount when prompts share leading context
Best use cases
Cost-sensitive production workloads
Switch high-volume LLM calls from GPT-4o to DeepSeek-V3 and cut bills by roughly 90 percent.
Reasoning tasks
Use R1 for math problems, code generation, and multi-step planning at a fraction of o1 cost.
Self-hosted deployments
Pull open weights and run on H100s for full data-residency control.
Integrations
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