Is DeepSeek Free? Yes, and There's No Paid Plan to Buy

Yes. DeepSeek's app and website are free, and there's nothing to upgrade to. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok each have a free plan with paid plans stacked on top. DeepSeek has no paid plan for its chatbot at all. Its download page calls the app "The official AI assistant from DeepSeek" and says you can "Chat with leading AI models for free."

The one thing DeepSeek sells is its API, the version developers build apps on, billed by the token. Its open model is free to download too, though the files come to about 510 GB.

Free isn't the same as unlimited, and it comes with conditions. You need an account. DeepSeek publishes no limits, although its web app has messages ready for several. And your chats are stored in China and can be used to train DeepSeek's models unless you switch that off.

For this post I read DeepSeek's website and download page, its API pricing page, change log and release notes, its help centre, terms of use, privacy policy and status page, and the app's App Store listing, all on 4 November 2026. I also opened DeepSeek's web chat without an account and went through the messages built into the web app.

The Short Answer

Question	Answer
Is DeepSeek free?	Yes. $0 on the web and in the iPhone and Android apps
Is there a paid plan?	No. DeepSeek sells no subscription, Pro or Plus plan for its chatbot
Is it unlimited?	No. DeepSeek publishes no limits, but the app has messages for limits it doesn't explain
Do I need an account?	Yes. The web chat goes straight to a sign-in page
Is the API free?	No. Its fast model costs $0.30 per million tokens in and $1.20 out at peak times
Can I download the model free?	Yes, under the MIT licence. The files come to about 510 GB
Are my chats used for training?	They can be, unless you turn off "Improve the model for everyone"
Are there ads?	DeepSeek's privacy policy says it does no targeted advertising

What DeepSeek's Free App Includes

A free account gets the whole app. DeepSeek has no feature list split by plan, because it has one plan. Going by its release notes and the app itself:

• Two modes, Instant and Expert. DeepSeek introduced them in April with its V4 models, and in August put its larger model, V4 Pro, into the app's Expert Mode. On 17 October it moved the app and website to V4.1-Flash-1017, the model its API now sells as the fast one. It doesn't publish which mode runs which model today.
• DeepThink, the switch that makes the model reason before it answers.
• Search. The app searches the web with DeepSeek's own search engine. You can't search and attach files in the same message. The app asks you to "turn off Search to upload files."
• Files. PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, images, text and code, up to 50 files a session, going by the app's own limit message. Other messages in the app say Expert Mode may not take uploads and that some modes read only the text in files and images, so what you can attach depends on the mode.
• Room for long documents. DeepSeek said in April that a context window of 1 million tokens was "now the default across all official DeepSeek services." By the usual rough conversion that's about 1,500 pages of text in one conversation.
• Read aloud, with a daily limit.
• Chat history that syncs between the web and the apps, sharing by link, and, on the web, an export of your account details and every chat under Settings, Data, Export data.

The App Store lists the app as Free, and its listing shows nothing to buy inside it. For Mac and Windows, DeepSeek's download page offers DeepSeek Harness, a desktop agent that comes with its own bill. More on that below.

There's No DeepSeek Subscription

If you came looking for a DeepSeek subscription or a DeepSeek Pro plan, there isn't one. This is what sets DeepSeek apart from every other big chatbot, and three of its own pages say it in different ways.

The privacy policy splits the two businesses. It collects payment details "When you use paid services in our open platform", meaning the API, and adds that payment data is "not applicable to DeepSeek App."

The App Store lists the app as Free, with no in-app purchases.

The help centre answers the question for the API too. Asked whether there are plans with higher limits, it says "There is a unified pricing standard and no tiered plans."

DeepSeek V4 Pro is a model, not a plan. It's the larger of the two models DeepSeek sells on its API, where it costs more per token. Nobody sells it to you as a monthly subscription, at least not DeepSeek.

So treat any site selling a "DeepSeek Pro" plan, a paid DeepSeek app or "DeepSeek free online, no login" as someone else's product. DeepSeek's own are on deepseek.com: the web chat, the iPhone and Android apps, Harness and the API platform. On anything else, you don't know who receives what you type.

Compare that with the others. ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro cost $20 a month, Google AI Pro $19.99 and Grok's Premium plan $30, and each company holds things back from its free plan to make the paid one worth buying. I went through what each free plan leaves out in Is ChatGPT free?, Is Claude free?, Is Gemini free? and Is Grok free?. DeepSeek has no paid tier to hold anything back for.

Is DeepSeek Free and Unlimited?

No, though you won't find that on DeepSeek's site. Its help centre, terms and download page give no message count, no daily cap and no reset time.

The web app tells a different story. Going through the messages built into it on 4 November, I found these among others:

• "Server busy, please try again later."
• "Too many search requests, please try again later"
• "Message limit reached. Please start a new chat."
• "File limit reached. 50 files max per session."
• "Daily read-aloud limit reached. Please try again later."

So the app is built to stop you at some point on how long one chat runs, how often you search, how many files a chat takes and how much it reads aloud. Apart from the 50 files, DeepSeek doesn't say where those points are, and there's no paid plan that moves them.

The other limit is shared capacity. No one can pay for priority in the app, so when the service is busy, everyone waits. DeepSeek's status page logged seven incidents in October. The longest was a four-hour partial outage of the web chat and API on 15 October, and there was an hour-long one on 3 November.

Why Is DeepSeek Free?

DeepSeek doesn't explain it anywhere I could find. Four things on its own pages go a long way.

The model is cheap to run. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash has 552 billion parameters, but its release note says only 8 billion are active when it reads your input and 16 billion when it writes. Its cache, the memory it keeps of a conversation, needs a quarter of the GPU memory the previous generation's did. DeepSeek's own summary, written about API prices, is "V4.1-Flash lets us serve more users at a lower cost."

It sells the API. Developers pay per token for the same models, and that's the paid business the privacy policy describes.

Your chats can train its models. The terms let DeepSeek use what you type and what the model answers to "provide, maintain, operate, develop or improve the Services or the underlying technologies", after de-identifying it, unless you turn off "Improve the model for everyone".

It says it's in no hurry. DeepSeek's April release note ends: "We remain committed to longtermism, advancing steadily toward our ultimate goal of AGI." My read is that a free app with a huge user base fits that goal better than a $20 plan would.

What You Give Instead

An Account

DeepSeek has no signed-out mode. When I opened chat.deepseek.com without an account on 4 November, it went straight to a sign-in page with email or phone and password, Google and Apple. The help centre adds three conditions worth knowing before you sign up:

• Email sign-up works only for addresses on DeepSeek's supported list. If yours is refused, the help centre suggests "a major international email provider such as Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, or Yahoo." That matters if your business email is on its own domain.
• Google sign-in doesn't work from an IP address in mainland China, and WeChat sign-in works only from one.
• If DeepSeek flags your IP address or phone number as "high-risk", you get a "Current device environment error", and the help centre's advice is to "try a different environment."

Your Chats, Stored in China

The privacy policy, last updated on 10 February 2026, says DeepSeek stores your data "in People's Republic of China" and keeps it "for as long as you have an account." The terms let it train on your chats unless you opt out. What that means for client work, and the government bans that followed in several countries, is in Is DeepSeek safe?. The short version is that the app is fine for public information and the wrong place for a client's personal or financial details.

No Targeted Ads

The privacy policy says, in capitals, "WE DO NOT ENGAGE IN TARGETED ADVERTISING", and the terms of use don't mention ads at all. That's a real difference from ChatGPT, which started testing ads on its Free plan in the US in February and is rolling them out to more regions.

Is the DeepSeek API Free?

No. The API is DeepSeek's paid product, and its pricing page has no free tier. You top up a balance by PayPal, bank card, Alipay or WeChat Pay, and every call is deducted from it. Two models are on sale, and the price depends on the time of day:

Per million tokens	deepseek-flash (V4.1-Flash-1017)	deepseek-v4-pro (V4-Pro-0813)
Input, cache hit	$0.006 peak, $0.003 off-peak	$0.044 peak, $0.022 off-peak
Input, cache miss	$0.30 peak, $0.15 off-peak	$1.32 peak, $0.66 off-peak
Output	$1.20 peak, $0.60 off-peak	$3.96 peak, $1.98 off-peak
Context window	1M tokens	1M tokens

Peak hours are 01:00 to 04:00 and 06:00 to 10:00 UTC, Monday to Friday, except on Chinese public holidays. The rest of the week is off-peak, at half price. Web search and page fetch are separate APIs at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests. DeepSeek let API users run them free inside DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex until 31 October, so anything that calls API search free is out of date.

In everyday terms, a thousand messages of about 2,000 tokens in and 500 out, none of it cached, at peak, come to $0.60 for the input and $0.60 for the output on deepseek-flash. That's $1.20 for the thousand, by my arithmetic. Cheap, but not free, and long chats cost more because every message sends the conversation so far.

A few details from the billing rules and the help centre:

• Charges come out of "your topped-up balance or granted balance", the granted balance first. The pricing page doesn't say who gets a granted balance or how much, so don't plan on free credit.
• Top-ups don't expire, and unused balance can be refunded.
• Deleting your DeepSeek account in the app forfeits any unused balance in your developer account. The help centre says so in its account-deletion steps.

DeepSeek Harness, DeepSeek's open-source desktop agent, is free to download, but its setup guide asks you to "enter a DeepSeek API key". Whatever work it does is billed to your API balance, unless you point it at another company's models, which it also supports.

Can You Run DeepSeek Free on Your Own Computer?

You can download it free. Running it is another matter.

DeepSeek publishes its models under the MIT licence, which lets anyone use, change and host them, commercially included. The current one, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, went up on Hugging Face on 17 October. Its 48 weight files come to about 510 GB, for a model DeepSeek puts at 552 billion parameters. That's a job for a server with data-centre GPUs, not a laptop.

This is how other apps offer DeepSeek without involving DeepSeek. A hosting company runs the open model on its own hardware, and your text goes to that company under its terms. The model doesn't change when it moves, and that includes its refusals on topics that are sensitive in China, which I tested in the safety post.

Can You Use DeepSeek Free for Business?

The terms allow it. DeepSeek assigns you whatever rights exist in what the model writes, and its terms list "personal use, academic research, derivative product development, training other models" among the uses it allows.

What you don't get is a business version. DeepSeek's site lists no team or business plan for the app, so every account runs on the same consumer terms and privacy policy, with chats stored in China and open to training unless you opt out. For a small business, that makes the free app fine for drafts, research and anything public, and the wrong tool for client names, invoices or contracts.

When DeepSeek's Free App Is Enough

You want a strong chatbot at $0 and nothing confidential goes in. DeepSeek's free account is the whole product, so you're not getting a cut-down trial of something better.

You work with long documents. The million-token window comes with the free account, and there's no bigger one to pay for.

You keep hitting "Server busy". There's no paid way around it inside DeepSeek. Wait, or use the same model somewhere else.

Client data goes in. Not the app. Read Is DeepSeek safe? first.

You want a second opinion from a model trained somewhere else. DeepSeek's app only has DeepSeek's models, and on some topics it refuses. In izzedo, below, a different model is one click away.

You're building a product on it. That's the API, billed per token, or the open model on a host.

Where izzedo Fits

izzedo chat's free plan includes DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, on the same 17 October update DeepSeek put into its own app. It runs on Fireworks AI, a US company whose documentation says it "does not log or store prompt or generation data for any open models, without explicit user opt-in." izzedo never calls DeepSeek's API, so nothing you type reaches DeepSeek, and there's no "Improve the model" switch to remember. izzedo doesn't train models on your chats, and neither do the model companies it uses.

DeepSeek sits in the same model picker as GPT-6 Luna, Claude Haiku 5.5, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Grok 4.7, Kimi K3 and Qwen, all on the free plan, with no card. In the thread below, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash priced a florist's wedding order. Then I switched to GPT-6 Luna, also free, and asked it to check the math and fit the order under a $1,000 budget.

DeepSeek's total is right. $325.50 of flowers, tripled, plus $150 makes $1,126.50. Luna went straight to the budget, 14 stems a centerpiece for $958.50, and never said whether the first total was right. It was. Neither model mentioned how close 15 stems comes. That's $1,000.50, fifty cents over, and worth a word with the couple before you take a stem out of every table. A second model catches the arithmetic. The judgment stays with you.

Agent mode and the 1,400+ connectors are on the free plan too, and izzedo asks before each tool call unless you change that. The $6 Hobby plan adds every other chat model, Claude Sonnet and Opus, GPT-6.1 Sol and Gemini 4 Argon among them. izzedo's allowance is shared across the models, and the current amounts are on the pricing page. If you've never put one question to two models, here's how it works.

The Bottom Line

DeepSeek is free, more completely than any of its big rivals. There's no paid plan for the app, so the free account is the whole product, with both modes, search, files and a million-token window. DeepSeek charges for one thing, its API, by the token.

Free still costs something. You need an account. Your chats go to China and can train DeepSeek's models unless you switch that off. The limits exist but have no numbers, and when the servers are busy there's no paid queue to jump. So use the app for work you wouldn't mind in a training set, turn off "Improve the model for everyone" anyway, and ignore any site selling a DeepSeek subscription.

DeepSeek has released a new model or update about once a month since August and changed its API prices twice, so check the date on anything you read about it, this post included.

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