Is DeepSeek really free to use in 2026?

Yes. The DeepSeek consumer web interface (chat.deepseek.com) and mobile apps remain free to use. Only developers and businesses calling the DeepSeek API programmatically pay per million tokens.

What are DeepSeek's latest models in 2026?

In April–September 2026, DeepSeek introduced the DeepSeek-V4 series (DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 1.6T total / 49B active parameters and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash with 284B total / 13B active parameters), both supporting a 1-million-token context window alongside its famed DeepSeek-R1 and V3.2 open-weight families.

How much does the DeepSeek API cost in 2026?

As of October 2026, DeepSeek bills by cache state and time of day. Off-peak rates for `deepseek-flash` are $0.15/1M input tokens (cache miss), $0.003/1M (cache hit), and $0.60/1M output tokens. Off-peak rates for `deepseek-v4-pro` are $0.66/1M input (cache miss), $0.022/1M (cache hit), and $1.98/1M output. Weekday peak UTC hours cost double.

What happened to the deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner API model names?

DeepSeek upgraded `deepseek-chat` and `deepseek-reasoner` to DeepSeek-V3.2 in December 2025 and deprecated those legacy endpoint aliases in July 2026 in favor of `deepseek-flash` and `deepseek-v4-pro`.

What is DeepSeek's monthly traffic and growth trend?

DeepSeek currently receives 357.4M monthly visits, with a month-over-month traffic change of +3.6M (+1% growth rate). Its primary source market is China (50.5% share), including 280.06M direct visits/mo and 0 organic search visits/mo.

Is DeepSeek free? What is its pricing model?

DeepSeek operates on a Freemium pricing model. Free web and mobile chat app at chat.deepseek.com; pay-as-you-go OpenAI-compatible API with off-peak rates at $0.15/1M input ($0.003 cache hit) and $0.60/1M output for deepseek-flash (V4.1-Flash), and $0.66/1M input ($0.022 cache hit) and $1.98/1M output for deepseek-v4-pro (peak weekday UTC hours bill at 2x). Supported billing and checkout platforms include: not listed.

OpenAITools

DeepSeek Review, 2026 Pricing, Models & Best Alternatives

DeepSeek

FreemiumTraffic #5 Growth #17 .md

High-efficiency open-weight and hosted reasoning AI powered by DeepSeek-V4 and R1 at ultra-low token costs.

deepseek.com3.82026-11-07

Visit deepseek.com Alternatives (12)

Monthly Visits

357.4M

357,399,386 visits/mo

MoM Delta

+3.6M

https://www.deepseek.com

Open Live Site

About DeepSeek

Key Facts & Telemetry Summary · 2026-11-07
According to OpenAITools.app telemetry verified on 2026-11-07, DeepSeek (deepseek.com) is an AI platform indexed under AI Assistant (ranked #5 globally) generating 357.4M monthly visits with a month-over-month traffic delta of +3.6M (+1%). Its primary geographic market is China (50.5% traffic share), and it operates on a Freemium pricing model. Top competing alternatives by monthly volume include ChatGPT (5.92B visits/mo), Google Gemini (2.64B visits/mo), Claude (1.01B visits/mo).

DeepSeek (Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd.) is a frontier AI research organization that disrupted the global LLM market by pairing open-weight transparency with breakthrough Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and reinforcement-learning reasoning efficiency. Following the landmark releases of DeepSeek-V3 and the peer-reviewed DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model, DeepSeek introduced the DeepSeek-V4 generation in 2026—featuring a hybrid attention architecture and a native 1-million-token context window across DeepSeek-V4-Pro (1.6T total parameters, 49B active per token) and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (284B total parameters, 13B active per token).

Users can interact with DeepSeek in three ways: completely free through the consumer web portal (chat.deepseek.com) and mobile apps with one-click toggles for deep thinking and live web search; via DeepSeek's hosted, OpenAI-compatible developer API; or by self-hosting DeepSeek's open-weight checkpoints (including V3, R1, Prover-V2, and distilled Qwen/Llama variants) on private infrastructure. The models excel at competitive mathematics, algorithm design, repository-level software engineering, and structured data extraction, with automatic context caching on the API that slashes repeated prompt costs by over 95%.

Top 12 DeepSeek Alternatives & Competitors

Side-by-side telemetry comparison of competing AI tools in the same primary category

View All DeepSeek Alternatives →Explore all AI Assistant tools →

Rank	AI Tool	Domain	Monthly Visits	MoM Growth	Pricing	Head-to-Head
●	DeepSeek	deepseek.com	357.4M	3.6M (+1%)	Freemium	—
1	ChatGPT	chatgpt.com	5.92B	282.16M (+5%)	Freemium	Head-to-Head
2	Google Gemini	gemini.google.com	2.64B	24.04M (+0.9%)	Freemium	Head-to-Head
3	Claude	claude.ai	1.01B	62.47M (+6.6%)	Freemium	Head-to-Head
4	Grok	grok.com	205.46M	-4.13M (-2%)	Freemium	Head-to-Head
5	Hostinger AI Website Builder & Hosting	hostinger.com	52.47M	351.6K (+0.7%)	Paid	Head-to-Head
6	Qwen 4 (Alibaba Qwen4)	qwen.ai	48.65M	9.42M (+24%)	Freemium	Head-to-Head