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ReviewsIs DeepSeek actually free?
How these scores work
Yes — unusually so. The chat is free with generous limits, and unlike every Western lab, the underlying models are open-weights under MIT: you can download and run them yourself, even commercially.
Comparable Western frontier access runs $20/month; here both the service and the weights are $0.
What you get free
- Free chat with a frontier-class model, web and app
- The model weights themselves, MIT-licensed, free to run yourself
- Reasoning mode included on the free tier
In practice: frontier-class AI where 'free' includes the model itself, with a data-jurisdiction trade-off on the hosted version.
Drawbacks
- Hosted data goes through China
- Content filtering on political topics
- API (not chat) is the paid surface
Also paywalled
- Only the developer API bills — by usage, cheaply
Free facts
| Verdict | Free Forever |
| Card required | No |
| Auto-bills | — |
| Account | Required for the app/web chat |
| Limits | Generous daily use; the open-weights models are free to download outright |
| The real cost | Nothing for chat. The models themselves are MIT-licensed — free even commercially. |
The catch
The hosted service runs on servers in China and your conversations are subject to Chinese data law and content filtering. Privacy-sensitive users should run the open weights locally instead — that's the genuinely free path.
The smart play
- Treat the hosted chat as public — or run the weights locally via Ollama/LM Studio for real privacy
- The distilled small models run on ordinary laptops
More info — tap to expand
What does open-weights actually get me?
Last checked: July 2026 · Verdict: Free Forever — a real permanent free plan. signup and fair limits — but no clock and no card.
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