About DeepSeek
DeepSeek shocked the industry by delivering near-frontier reasoning at a fraction of the cost — and giving the weights away. The chat app is free with visible chain-of-thought reasoning, the API undercuts everyone, and the open models mean you can run a genuinely strong assistant on your own hardware. For math, coding and logic on a budget, it's remarkable.
The best free reasoning per dollar in AI, full stop — and the open weights make it the power-user's self-hosting favorite. (Consider the China data residency before using it for sensitive work.)
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Guides · blogEvery place DeepSeek shows up across Choose My Stack — the research it’s part of and the articles that cover it.
The honest list
What we love
＋Free access to strong reasoning models
＋Open weights — self-host it
＋Dramatically cheap API
＋Shows its reasoning steps
Watch out for
−Data stored in China (privacy)
−Sparse app ecosystem
−Heavy topic filtering on some subjects