Web chat is 100% free. API starts at $0.14/1M tokens — up to 100× cheaper than GPT-5.5. 5 million free tokens for new developers. No monthly subscription required.
No credit card. No trial. No limit on chat usage. DeepSeek's web and mobile products are permanently free for individual users.
Full access to DeepSeek V4-Flash (Instant Mode) and V4-Pro (Expert Mode) at chat.deepseek.com. No usage limits, no rate restrictions for normal use.
Unlimited · Free ForeverFree iOS and Android apps with voice input, file uploads, image understanding, conversation history sync, and DeepThink reasoning mode. No in-app purchases needed.
iOS & Android · FreeNew API accounts at platform.deepseek.com receive 5 million tokens in free credits. No credit card required. Valid for 30 days — enough for ~2,500–5,000 test calls.
5M Tokens · No CardAll DeepSeek models are MIT-licensed open source. Download from Hugging Face and run locally on your own GPU hardware with zero API fees. V4-Flash weights = 160GB.
MIT License · Free ForeverPay only for tokens you use. No monthly fees, no seat licenses. Prices per million (1M) tokens in USD.
Fastest, most affordable. 284B total / 13B active. Within 1–2% of Pro on most coding benchmarks at 12× lower cost. Best for high-volume production workloads.
Best open-weight model available. 1.6T total / 49B active. 80.6% SWE-bench, Codeforces #1 (3,206). Use for complex reasoning, agentic coding, and frontier-quality tasks.
Previous flagship. 671B total / 37B active. 128K context. Excellent for general chat, RAG, summarization, and text generation where V4's extra capability isn't needed.
Dedicated chain-of-thought reasoning. 97.3% MATH-500. RL-trained without SFT. Best for math olympiad, scientific reasoning, and multi-step logical inference tasks.
100% free. No account required. Includes DeepThink reasoning mode, file uploads, image analysis, and web search. Both V4 models available instantly.
deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner now route to V4-Flash. They will stop working July 24, 2026 at 15:59 UTC. Migration is changing only the model name — no other code changes needed.
✓ Prices verified April 28, 2026 · Always confirm at api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing before production use.
No subscription fee — you pay only for tokens consumed. Here's what typical workloads actually cost per month with 70% cache hit rate.
Web chat is free — API only needed for automated apps or integrations.
V4-Flash at this scale saves thousands compared to GPT-5.5 or Claude Opus.
Maximize cache hits: consistent system prompts can cut input costs by 90%.
At enterprise scale, self-hosting V4-Flash (MIT license) can eliminate API costs entirely.
Enter your usage parameters and instantly see your estimated monthly, daily, and per-call costs with context caching factored in.
Side-by-side API pricing and subscription comparison against every major AI provider as of May 2026.
| Model | Input /1M | Cache Hit /1M | Output /1M | Context | Open? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4-Flash | $0.14 | $0.014 | $0.28 | 1M | ✓ MIT |
| DeepSeek V4-Pro | $1.74 | $0.174 | $3.48 | 1M | ✓ MIT |
| DeepSeek V3.2 | $0.28 | $0.028 | $0.42 | 128K | ✓ MIT |
| DeepSeek R1 | $0.55 | $0.14 | $2.19 | 128K | ✓ MIT |
| GPT-5.5 | $5.00 | manual | $20.00 | 128K | ✗ Closed |
| GPT-4o | $2.50 | $1.25 | $10.00 | 128K | ✗ Closed |
| Claude Opus 4.7 | $5.00 | $0.50 | $25.00 | 200K | ✗ Closed |
| Gemini 3 Pro | $1.25 | manual | $5.00 | 1M | ✗ Closed |
| GPT-5.4 | $10.00 | manual | $30.00 | 128K | ✗ Closed |
| Product | Monthly Price | Models Included | Free Tier | API Access |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek Chat | $0 / month | V4-Flash + V4-Pro | ✓ Unlimited | Pay-per-token |
| ChatGPT Plus | $20 / month | GPT-5.2 + DALL-E | ✓ Limited | Extra cost |
| Claude Pro | $20 / month | Opus 4.5 + Sonnet | ✓ Limited | Extra cost |
| Gemini AI Pro | $20 / month | Gemini 3.1 Pro | ✓ Limited | Extra cost |
| ChatGPT Go | $5 / month | GPT-5 basic | ✓ Very limited | Extra cost |
96% cheaper than OpenAI o1 for the same class of deep reasoning tasks. Use when accuracy on complex logic matters more than speed.
Pure RL-trained chain-of-thought model. No supervised fine-tuning. Emergent reasoning, self-verification, and backtracking — the most capable reasoning model you can run for under $1/1M tokens.
When to use R1:
No dedicated "coding plan" exists — but here's how each option maps to common developer use cases and budgets.
Community insights from r/deepseek, r/LocalLLaMA, and r/MachineLearning on DeepSeek's pricing and value.
"Switched our entire RAG pipeline from GPT-4o to V4-Flash last week. Monthly bill dropped from $1,200 to $38. Same quality for our document summarization use case. The 90% cache discount makes the math absolutely bonkers."
"People keep asking if the free tier is legit. It is. chat.deepseek.com gives you V4-Pro (Expert Mode) for free, no rate limits that I've noticed for normal use. There is no 'DeepSeek Plus' — it's just free. For API you need to pay but it starts at $0.14/1M."
"R1 for math is insane. 97.3% on MATH-500 at $2.19/1M output vs o1 at $60/1M. That's not a rounding difference — it's 27× cheaper for equivalent reasoning quality on quantitative problems. This changes my cost model for production math agents."
"Caveat: V4-Flash is great but be careful with sensitive customer data. Chinese company, servers in China, no HIPAA/SOC2 guarantees on the direct API. We run it through AWS Bedrock for compliance. Adds ~30% cost but worth it for our healthcare SaaS."
"If you're using Cursor, Claude Code, or Windsurf — just point it at DeepSeek V4-Flash. The agentic coding is legitimately on par with V4-Pro for most repo tasks and you're paying $0.14/$0.28 instead of $5/$20. Change two config lines."
"Got the 75% promo on V4-Pro before it expires May 31. At $0.435/1M input it's stupid cheap for frontier reasoning. Already set a calendar reminder to check if the discount extends. DeepSeek has been progressively reducing prices — I wouldn't be shocked if V4-Flash goes even lower."
Yes — completely. The web chat at chat.deepseek.com and the official iOS/Android apps are 100% free with no usage limits for normal use. You get access to both V4-Flash (Instant Mode) and V4-Pro (Expert Mode), DeepThink reasoning, file uploads, web search, and image analysis — all at $0/month. There is no paid "Plus" or "Pro" chat subscription. The only paid service is the API for developers building applications.
DeepSeek V4 has two variants. V4-Flash: $0.14/1M input (cache miss), $0.014/1M (cache hit), $0.28/1M output. V4-Pro: $1.74/1M input, $0.174/1M cache hit, $3.48/1M output at regular price. V4-Pro is currently 75% off until May 31, 2026 — promo prices are $0.435/1M input and $0.87/1M output. Both models have 1M token context and 384K max output. Prices verified April 28, 2026 at api-docs.deepseek.com.
There is no monthly subscription — you pay only for tokens consumed. Rough estimates with 70% cache hit rate: Light use (10K calls/mo): ~$0.30 on V4-Flash. Medium use (100K calls/mo): ~$4–8 on V4-Flash. Heavy use (1M calls/mo): ~$50–100 on V4-Flash. Compare to ChatGPT API (GPT-5.5) which would cost ~$30, ~$200–400, and ~$3,000+ respectively for the same usage. Use the calculator on this page for your specific token volumes.
DeepSeek R1 costs $0.55/1M input and $2.19/1M output. OpenAI o1 costs $15/1M input and $60/1M output. That's a 27× difference on input and a 27× difference on output — roughly 96% cheaper for equivalent reasoning tasks. R1 generates more output tokens per query (chain-of-thought), so your effective per-query cost is higher than Flash/V3, but still dramatically cheaper than any OpenAI reasoning model. Use R1 only when deep multi-step reasoning is genuinely needed.
Automatic and free — no configuration needed. When a request starts with the same prefix as a recent request (system prompt, document, etc.), DeepSeek serves those tokens at 10% of the normal input price. For V4-Flash: $0.014/1M instead of $0.14/1M. At 70% cache hit rate, effective input cost drops by ~63%. At 90% cache hit rate (achievable with consistent system prompts), effective input cost drops by ~86%. Structure prompts with static content first (system prompt, documents) and variable content (user queries) last to maximize hit rate.
Dramatically cheaper on API. V4-Flash ($0.14/$0.28) vs GPT-5.5 ($5/$20): 36× cheaper on input, 71× cheaper on output. Even V4-Pro at regular prices ($1.74/$3.48) is 2.9× cheaper on input and 5.7× cheaper on output than GPT-5.5. For chat (not API), DeepSeek is free while ChatGPT Plus costs $20/month. Reddit consistently confirms the savings are real in production — switch typically takes under 5 minutes since DeepSeek is OpenAI-API-compatible.
There's no dedicated "coding plan" — all API plans give you access to DeepSeek's coding-capable models. For coding specifically: use deepseek-v4-flash for most tasks (82.6% HumanEval, 79% SWE-bench, $0.14/1M). Use deepseek-v4-pro for complex agentic coding (80.6% SWE-bench, Codeforces #1 at 3,206). V4 is integrated with Claude Code, OpenClaw, and OpenCode. It works with Cursor and Windsurf by pointing the base URL to DeepSeek's API. Self-hosting via Hugging Face (MIT license) eliminates all API costs for enterprise scale.
Both legacy aliases retire on July 24, 2026 at 15:59 UTC — after which they will return errors with no fallback. Currently: deepseek-chat routes to V4-Flash non-thinking mode; deepseek-reasoner routes to V4-Flash thinking mode. Migration is a one-line change: replace the model name with deepseek-v4-flash or deepseek-v4-pro. Base URL, authentication, and request format are all unchanged. No card required, no other code changes.
Web chat is free forever. API starts at $0.14/1M tokens with 5M free tokens on new accounts. No subscription. No commitment.