Chat & Assistants
DeepSeek
Open-weight reasoning models at a fraction of frontier pricing.
Our ruling
The price-performance outlier. If cost per token is the constraint, nothing else is close.
Wrong forAnyone whose data governance rules out the hosted version.
- Best for
- Strong reasoning on a tight budget
- Pricing
- Free web · API from $0.28 per million tokens
What it's actually used for
- Open weights, so it can be self-hosted where data cannot leave the building
- API pricing roughly an order of magnitude below frontier models
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