Is DeepSeek actually free?

Capable and free — and the data question here is different from the others, so answer it deliberately. The official apps and deepseek.com. Wrapper apps charging for it are common. The company is Chinese and its consumer service stores user data on servers in China under Chinese law. Several governments have restricted the app on official devices for that reason. This is a jurisdiction question, not an accusation — but it should decide what you type into it. The open-weight models are genuinely open and can be run locally, which is the way to use it if the jurisdiction concerns you. Treat anything you send as leaving your control. That's true of every hosted AI service; the variable here is which legal system it lands in.

No — DeepSeek does not ask for a card to use the free version. Auto-billing: —.

Generous daily use; the open-weights models are free to download outright. 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.

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

Nothing for chat. The models themselves are MIT-licensed — free even commercially.

Nothing for chat. The models themselves are MIT-licensed — free even commercially. Comparable Western frontier access runs $20/month; here both the service and the weights are $0.

As of our last check, yes. 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. Free tiers change without notice, which is why every page here carries the date it was checked.