Is DeepSeek free?
Yes — DeepSeek's web chat at chat.deepseek.com and its mobile apps are free to use with no subscription. The API is paid but very cheap (from about $0.14 per million input tokens). The model weights are also free to download under the MIT License, so you can run DeepSeek yourself at no license cost.
Why — the first-principles explanation
DeepSeek is free to use through the chat website and app, but 'free' hides three separate products, each with its own economics. The consumer chat is free because it's a growth and reputation play: getting hundreds of millions of people using it builds influence and shows off the technology, even though every answer costs DeepSeek real GPU money. The trade-off you pay is not cash but data — your conversations are stored on servers in China.
The API is paid because that's the actual business. Developers and companies that build products on top of DeepSeek pay per token, which covers the compute and turns a profit. It's priced aggressively low, roughly a tenth to a thirtieth of comparable Western models, precisely to win developers away from pricier competitors.
The open weights are free in a deeper sense: DeepSeek releases its models under the permissive MIT License, so anyone can download, run, modify, and even commercialize them without paying DeepSeek anything. Here 'free' means freedom, not just zero price — though you still pay for the hardware or cloud you run them on.
An example that makes it click
Think of a fancy coffee shop that gives away free cups at the counter (the chat app), sells wholesale beans by the pound to other cafés (the paid API), and also publishes its exact recipe online for anyone to brew at home (the open weights).
Walk in and grab a free coffee — no charge, but you sign the guestbook (your data is stored). Run a café and you buy beans by weight, cheaply (the API, per token). Or download the recipe and make it in your own kitchen for the cost of your own beans and electricity (self-hosting). Three ways to get the same coffee, only one of which asks for money directly.
Key facts
- DeepSeek's web chat (chat.deepseek.com) and mobile apps are free with no subscription required.
- The API is pay-as-you-go, starting around $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens (as of 2026-07).
- Model weights are released under the MIT License, free to download, run, and commercialize.
- Free chat use trades money for data: conversations are stored on servers in mainland China.
- Free API-style access is also available through third-party hosts' free tiers or by self-hosting the open weights.
An open-weight Chinese model family that matched frontier quality at low cost.
Affiliate link — we may earn a commission at no cost to you.▶ The 60-second explainer (script)
Is DeepSeek free? Yes — mostly. The DeepSeek chat website and the mobile apps are completely free to use, no subscription, no paywall. What you trade instead is data: your chats are stored on servers in China. If you're a developer building an app, you'd use the API, which is paid — but it's extremely cheap, starting around fourteen cents per million words of input. And here's the part people miss: DeepSeek releases its actual models for free under an open MIT license, so you can download them and run them on your own computer without paying DeepSeek anything. So there are three versions of 'free': free chat, cheap API, and free-to-self-host weights. For most people, just open the app and start typing — it won't cost a cent.
What authoritative sources say
People also ask
Do I need to pay for the DeepSeek app?
No. The web chat and mobile apps are free to download and use without a subscription.
Is there a catch to the free version?
The main trade-off is privacy: free chat use stores your conversations on servers in China, and heavy demand can cause 'server busy' messages.
Is the API free?
No, the API is pay-as-you-go, but it's inexpensive; new accounts sometimes get trial credit, and free tiers exist via third-party hosts.
Can I run DeepSeek for free myself?
Yes — the weights are free under the MIT License, so you can download and run them locally, paying only for your own hardware or cloud.