🟢 Updated June 2026
DeepSeek Review (2026)
Overall rating: ★★★☆☆ 7.9/10
Chinese open-source LLM with near-GPT-4 quality at a fraction of the cost. Controversial for data privacy.
📋 Key facts
| Provider | DeepSeek AI |
| Category | Large Language Models |
| Monthly price | Free |
| API input (per 1M tokens) | $0.14 |
| API output (per 1M tokens) | $0.28 |
| Cost — 10k tickets (800 tokens avg) | $1.68 |
| Context window | 128K tokens |
| Free tier | ✅ Yes |
| Best for | Budget coding projects, Research, Non-sensitive internal tools |
✅ Pros
- Extremely cheap API ($0.14/M)
- Strong coding and math
- Open-source weights available
- Free to use
❌ Cons
- Data stored in China (privacy risk)
- Banned in some enterprises
- Less reliable uptime
- No GDPR compliance
🎯 Who should use DeepSeek?
DeepSeek is best suited for: Budget coding projects, Research, Non-sensitive internal tools.
Chinese open-source LLM with near-GPT-4 quality at a fraction of the cost. Controversial for data privacy.
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⚠️ Based on independent analysis of public pricing data and documented benchmarks. Updated June 2026. See our methodology.