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DeepSeek: pricing, limits and what it's actually good at

Open-weight reasoning model with very low API prices

Made by	DeepSeek (Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence)
Official site	https://chat.deepseek.com
Platforms	Web, iOS, Android, macOS, Windows
Free tier	Yes
Pricing	Web and app free; API list price deepseek-flash CNY 1 / 2 per million input tokens (off-peak / peak) and CNY 4 / 8 output; deepseek-v4-pro CNY 4.5 / 9 input and CNY 13.5 / 27 output (checked 2026-10-29)
Context window	1M tokens of context; up to 384K tokens of output (checked 2026-10-29)
Non-English	Native Chinese product with complete Chinese documentation, and Chinese Q&A plus writing are its main use (checked 2026-10-29)
Availability	Directly reachable inside mainland China with no proxy, and a China edition exists (checked 2026-10-29).

What DeepSeek does well

Publishes open weights you can download and self-host
Per-token API prices sit far below US providers
Reasoning and code output hold up on hard problems
Handles Chinese and English at roughly the same level

Where it falls short

Almost no multimodal support for images or audio
Response times wobble during Chinese peak hours
Plugin and integration ecosystem stays thin

Who should use it

Budget-sensitive developers
Chinese writing and translation
Private or on-premise deployment

What it feels like day to day

Free, good enough, and honest about math and code, which keeps it in my tab bar. Derivations and quick scripts land without much back-and-forth. Anything visual fails: no reading screenshots, nothing useful for audio, so those go to another tool. On Chinese evenings the stream stalls for tens of seconds and I switch tasks. Small thing I appreciate is that the code comments it writes are usable, so I do not have to add them.

Compared with

ChatGPT vs DeepSeek: which one to pay for

FAQ

Is DeepSeek free?

Yes — there is a free tier you can start on. Whether it's enough depends on how much you use it; limits are on the official pricing page.

How much text can DeepSeek handle at once?

1M tokens of context; up to 384K tokens of output (checked 2026-10-29)

Is DeepSeek available in my country?

Directly reachable inside mainland China with no proxy, and a China edition exists (checked 2026-10-29).

Sources: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/zh-cn/quick_start/pricing · https://www.deepseek.com — checked 2026-10-29.