Short answer: yes, the DeepSeek chatbot is free to use in 2026, and the API charges per token with no fixed subscription. That’s the clean version. The messy version — the one you need before you commit an account, a workflow, or a production budget — has layers: the web chat, the mobile app, the paid API, the open weights you can self-host, and the regulatory quirks that affect whether “deepseek free” even means “available to you” where you live. This guide walks through each layer with current prices, what’s included, and where the hidden costs sit. By the end, you’ll know which surface is genuinely free, which looks free but isn’t, and how to pick the right one.

The short answer: which parts of DeepSeek are free

DeepSeek operates on three distinct surfaces, and only two of them are free at the point of use:

• Web chat at chat.deepseek.com — free, no subscription.
• Mobile app (iOS and Android) — free, no in-app purchases.
• Developer API — paid, per-token. No monthly fee, but no free tier either beyond any granted balance the billing console may offer.
• Self-hosted open weights — the weights are free to download; you pay for the hardware to run them.

If you just want to chat with a capable model without a credit card, the web and app are the answer. If you want to build software on top of DeepSeek, you pay per million tokens. The rest of this article unpacks each case with current numbers.

The free chatbot: what you get at chat.deepseek.com

As of April 24, 2026, the consumer-facing DeepSeek chat runs on DeepSeek V4, released the same day. You can try it at chat.deepseek.com via Expert Mode or Instant Mode, which correspond to the Pro and Flash tiers of the new V4 family. The DeepThink toggle, familiar from the V3.x era, now switches V4 between its non-thinking and thinking modes.

There is no message meter visible to users and no subscription paywall on the chat. DeepSeek’s official API rate-limit page does not publish a per-user cap, and the chat interface does not document a strict daily limit either. That does not mean infinite throughput — during viral traffic surges the servers can slow or queue requests, and the context window will eventually force a new chat once a single conversation runs long enough to hit the session cap.

What the free chat includes today:

• V4 (Instant and Expert modes) with the 1-million-token context shared by both tiers
• DeepThink toggle for reasoning mode
• File upload with text extraction
• Web search
• Chat history sync across devices when you sign in

If you have never created an account, signing up for DeepSeek takes an email or phone number and unlocks history sync. You can also stay signed out and use the chat anonymously in a browser.

The mobile app: also free, with caveats

The official DeepSeek app on iOS and Android is free, ad-free, and has no in-app purchases. The same V4 model family powers the app as the web. Before you install, check two things:

1. Availability. Italy’s Garante blocked the DeepSeek app on privacy grounds in January 2025, and several US states restrict it on government devices. See our DeepSeek availability by country reference for the current picture in your jurisdiction.
2. Authenticity. The App Store and Play Store both host imitator apps that skim prompts or charge subscriptions for a wrapper around the free service. Our guide to verifying the official DeepSeek app shows you how to check the publisher, the store URL, and the permissions before installing.

The API: not free, but inexpensive per token

This is where the word “free” gets slippery. The DeepSeek API charges per million tokens and has no flat subscription. New accounts may see a granted balance — a small promotional credit that can expire — but there is no published, guaranteed free tier, and comparison sites that cite “5 million free tokens” are not reflecting the official documentation. Check your billing console for current offers rather than trusting secondary sources.

Chat requests hit POST /chat/completions, the OpenAI-compatible endpoint at https://api.deepseek.com. DeepSeek also supports the Anthropic API format on the same base URL, so either SDK works by swapping base_url and api_key. The API is stateless — unlike the web chat, which keeps your session on DeepSeek’s side, every API call must resend the full conversation history.

V4 pricing snapshot

According to DeepSeek’s pricing page as of April 2026:

Simon Willison’s April 24, 2026 writeup places DeepSeek-V4-Flash as the cheapest of the small frontier models, beating even OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 Nano, and V4-Pro as the cheapest of the larger frontier models. V4-Pro is roughly 12× more expensive per output token than V4-Flash, so default to Flash unless you have measured a quality gap that matters.

Two points the pricing table doesn’t shout about:

• Cache-hit pricing is automatic — every request with a repeated prefix benefits without opt-in, as long as the prefix is at least 1,024 tokens and matches byte-for-byte.
• Off-peak discounts ended on September 5, 2025 and have not returned with V4. Any article still claiming a 50 % or 75 % night-time discount is out of date.

Legacy model IDs and the retirement deadline

If you have existing code using deepseek-chat or deepseek-reasoner, it still works — but not forever. The legacy IDs will be fully retired on July 24, 2026 at 15:59 UTC, and currently route to deepseek-v4-flash in non-thinking and thinking mode respectively. Migration is a one-line model= change; the base_url stays the same. See our DeepSeek API pricing page for the full migration note.

A worked example: what 1 million calls actually cost

Imagine a chatbot on deepseek-v4-flash with a 2,000-token system prompt (cached across calls), a 200-token user message (uncached on each call), and a 300-token reply, run 1,000,000 times:

Input, cache hit   : 2,000,000,000 tokens × $0.028/M = $56.00
Input, cache miss  :   200,000,000 tokens × $0.14/M  = $28.00
Output             :   300,000,000 tokens × $0.28/M  = $84.00
                                                       -------
Total                                                   $168.00

On deepseek-v4-pro the same workload costs $290.00 + $348.00 + $1,044.00 = $1,682.00 — about 10× more. If you’re running DeepSeek for business workloads at volume, that ratio drives the decision. The DeepSeek cost estimator will spit out a number for your own mix in seconds.

The open weights: free to download, not free to run

V4 uses the standard MIT license, and at 1.6T total parameters V4-Pro is the largest open-weights model released to date. You can download either model from Hugging Face and run it locally — the code and weights are yours, no licence fee, no telemetry.

The catch is hardware. Pro is 865 GB on Hugging Face and Flash is 160 GB; a lightly quantised Flash should run on a 128 GB M5 MacBook Pro, while Pro may require streaming the active experts from disk. In practice, serious use of the full-size weights means a multi-GPU server or a rented cloud instance. Our install DeepSeek locally walkthrough and DeepSeek hardware calculator go deeper on the real cost of self-hosting.

Licensing is per-model, so verify before you ship a product:

Free vs paid: which layer fits which user

If you’re still weighing these against each other, our dedicated DeepSeek free vs paid comparison lays out the trade-offs in more detail.

Hidden costs of “free”

“Free” is never only about money. Three things to weigh:

Privacy

Chats submitted to DeepSeek’s web and app are processed on servers in China and may be stored under Chinese law. That includes any file you upload and any code you paste in. For non-sensitive work this is a reasonable trade; for client data, legal documents, or proprietary code, it is not. See DeepSeek privacy for the full breakdown, and consider the self-hosted route if data residency matters.

Availability

Italy blocked the app in January 2025 over data-protection concerns. Several US states restrict its use on government devices. There is no broad federal US ban, but check our DeepSeek US restrictions page before assuming you can deploy it in a regulated context.

Reliability

The free web chat goes through traffic surges — V4 launch day was an obvious example — and DeepSeek occasionally pauses new API top-ups during peak demand. For anything production-critical, budget for a fallback provider.

A minimal code example

Here is a Python snippet using the OpenAI SDK against DeepSeek. It’s the cheapest way to test whether V4-Flash fits your workload:

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.deepseek.com",
    api_key="YOUR_DEEPSEEK_KEY",
)

resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="deepseek-v4-flash",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Summarise this paragraph in 20 words."}],
    temperature=1.3,
    max_tokens=200,
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)

For thinking mode, add reasoning_effort="high" and extra_body={"thinking": {"type": "enabled"}}; the response will return reasoning_content alongside the final content. JSON mode is designed to return valid JSON, not guaranteed — include the word “json” and a short example schema in your prompt, and set max_tokens high enough to avoid truncation. The JSON mode guide covers the edge cases.

So, is DeepSeek actually free?

For end users: yes. The web chat and the mobile app are genuinely free, with no subscription and no ads. You pay with data — your prompts are processed in China — and with the occasional traffic wobble during launch windows.

For developers: not really. The API is cheap, often an order of magnitude cheaper than comparable Western providers, but it is priced per token. “Free” credits are promotional and should be confirmed in your billing console, not assumed from third-party blog posts.

For researchers and companies that need data residency: the open weights under MIT are the closest thing to a truly free path, at the cost of the hardware to run them.

Whichever surface fits you, start with the DeepSeek beginner guides and work up. The chat is fine to pick up in five minutes; the API rewards spending an hour on the docs before you burn tokens.

Last verified: 2026-04-24. DeepSeek AI Guide is an independent resource and is not affiliated with DeepSeek or its parent company. Model IDs, pricing and API behaviour change; check the official DeepSeek documentation and pricing page before committing to a production decision.