Two products with one name
DeepSeek is the name people use for a free ChatGPT-shaped app. It is also the name of an API you pay for by the token. Mixing those up is how a “free forever” post gets written.
On 23 August 2026, deepseek.com still says “Chat Now — Free access to DeepSeek. Experience the intelligent model,” and separately “Access API — Build with the latest DeepSeek models.” The chat login is at chat.deepseek.com. The homepage banner says DeepSeek-V4-Pro is out on web, mobile and API. I am repeating their words. I am not scoring V4-Pro against GPT-5.6.
What “free” is documented as
The live homepage offer is free access to the chat. That is the claim I will stand on.
A January 2025 DeepSeek post said the official app was 100% free, no ads, no in-app purchases, and warned people to download only from official stores. That post is a year and a half old. I am not going to treat 2025 marketing as 2026 terms. If you need “no ads” in writing today, open the current app listing or the current terms — I did not find a 2026 pricing page for the consumer chat that restates the no-ads line.
ChatGPT Free is also $0. Official pricing: unlimited text chats with GPT-5.6 Luna, with guardrails, and limited uploads, images, voice and research. It is not an empty product. “Switch to DeepSeek because ChatGPT costs $20” is only true if you were about to pay Plus.
The API is not the chat
DeepSeek’s official API docs publish per-million-token prices, with peak and off-peak rates, and a note dated for 23 August 2026 about weekend off-peak billing. That is a developer bill. It is how people say DeepSeek is “200× cheaper than GPT.” Those ratios are API maths. They are not the consumer chat.
ChatGPT’s API is likewise a different bill from Plus. Official Plus help says API usage is not included.
If you are a person in a browser, the API table is trivia. If you are wiring a bot, it is the whole product.
What I will not pretend
I will not pretend DeepSeek is hosted in the same legal and privacy regime as OpenAI or Anthropic. DeepSeek is a Chinese company. The chat login page links terms and a privacy policy. I am not going to summarise a legal PDF I have not quoted section by section. If data residency is why you opened this page, read those policies, or do not use the chat.
I will not invent daily message caps. DeepSeek’s homepage does not print one.
I will not invent a DeepSeek Plus price. I did not find one on the homepage.
How I would choose, labelled as opinion
If I want a second free chat box to compare answers with ChatGPT Free, I would open DeepSeek’s official chat and I would not paste anything I would not put in a random web form.
If I want memory, a US/EU vendor I can name on an invoice, and the $20 feature set, I would stay on ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro.
If I want cheap tokens for a program I am writing, I would read DeepSeek’s current API price table and OpenAI’s current API table on the same day, not a screenshot from 2025.
I have not used DeepSeek as my daily driver. I am not going to invent coding-benchmark bragging.