DeepSeek at a glance: what it does, its pricing, and the best AI alternatives for llm providers & apis. Pricing, features and alternatives, updated for 2026.
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Chinese AI lab whose chat app is free and whose open-weight models, including the R1 reasoning model, are sold cheaply via API.
DeepSeek became widely known in 2025 when its R1 reasoning model performed close to leading closed models at a fraction of the cost. The chat app at chat.deepseek.com is free, the API is pay-per-token at low rates, and model weights are published for self-hosting. Consider data-residency rules before sending sensitive data to the hosted service.