Strengths
- Very low API price: $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens at peak, half that off-peak. Cached input from $0.003.
- Open weights under the permissive MIT license, which also allows commercial use.
- A 1 million token context window, answers of up to 384K tokens, and it understands images.
- DeepSeek says it scores better than the previous version while writing shorter answers, for example 77.0 versus 74.2 on DeepSWE v1.1.
- The API is compatible with both OpenAI and Anthropic, so you can plug it into tools such as Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode.
Weaknesses
- The app, website and API store personal data in China, and the privacy policy does not say on what basis data leaves the EU.
- Czechia's NÚKIB rates DeepSeek products as a high threat, and they are banned in Czech state administration.
- Peak hours include 06:00–10:00 UTC on weekdays, which is the European morning, so daytime costs are harder to predict.
- All published test results come from DeepSeek itself, partly from internal tests.
Best for
- cheap high-volume API processing of data without personal information
- coding agents through an API compatible with Claude Code and Codex
- self-hosting a strong open model under the MIT license
Not ideal for
- personal or confidential data in the DeepSeek app or API
- Czech public administration
- regulated sectors that need a GDPR transfer mechanism
How to use it in Europe
The chat.deepseek.com website, the mobile app and the API work in Slovakia and Czechia, but everything you type is stored in China and may be used for training. Czech state administration may not use them for official work, and Czechia's NÚKIB rates the threat as high. Slovakia's NBÚ warned about data collection, according to media reports, and in Italy the app was pulled from the app stores in 2025. Open weights are a different case: download the model from Hugging Face and run it on your own server with no link to DeepSeek. No data leaves, and the NÚKIB warning does not apply. In the API it is called deepseek-flash.
Price compared with similar models
Benchmark results
| Benchmark | Score | Source |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSWE v1.1 | 77.0 | api-docs.deepseek.com ↗ (vendor-reported), October 2026 |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0, Claude Code harness | 42.3 | api-docs.deepseek.com ↗ (vendor-reported), October 2026 |
| Humanity's Last Exam, no tools | 42.6 | api-docs.deepseek.com ↗ (vendor-reported), October 2026 |
| Automation-Bench v1.0.6 | 60.5 | api-docs.deepseek.com ↗ (vendor-reported), October 2026 |
Benchmarks cover only a narrow slice of ability and vendors often report them at their best settings. Treat them as a rough guide.
More models from this vendor
- DeepSeek V4 Pro: DeepSeek's largest open-weight model for demanding text tasks at a low price. It does not understand images.
Similar models from other vendors
- Claude Haiku 5.5 (Anthropic): Claude's cheapest and fastest model, built for classification, data extraction and large volumes of simple tasks.
- Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite (Google): A very fast, low-cost Google model for large volumes of simple tasks, such as pulling data out of documents.
- Mistral Small 4 (Mistral AI): Mistral's cheap, fast open model under Apache 2.0 for everyday tasks through the API or on your own server.
- GPT-6.1 Terra (OpenAI): OpenAI's fast, cheaper model for working with images, operating a computer and everyday office work.
- Qwen3.8-Flash (Alibaba (Qwen)): A very cheap, fast Qwen model for high volumes of tasks. Unlike Max and Plus, it runs in Frankfurt with processing kept in the EU.
- Grok 4.3 (xAI): An older, cheaper Grok from April 2026 with a 1-million-token window. Good for lots of low-cost API calls.