Catalog/ № 012
DeepSeek API
situationalOpen-weights lab with frontier-ish reasoning at disruptive prices.
api-docs.deepseek.comVerified 2026-08-15
ledger entry · observed by @whysanesanders
Unbeatable price-performance for reasoning workloads — R1-class output at a tenth of frontier prices. But it is hosted in China: many companies simply cannot send data there.
Known limitations
- Data residency is a compliance blocker for many orgs.
- API capacity and reliability have wobbled under demand.
- Censorship baked in on some topics.
- Peak/off-peak pricing since 2026-08-16 (peak 01:00-04:00, 06:00-10:00 UTC).
Facts
- pricing
- paid1
- price note
- no free API tier; V4 Flash $0.44/$1.32, V4 Pro $1.32/$3.96 per 1M (peak; off-peak 50% off)
- free tier
- no
- open source
- no
- api
- yes
- self-host
- no
- category
- models-api
Models used
Sources
If we can't show the source, we don't print the number.
Same shelf — models-api
Anthropic API
models-api
Claude models direct — the practitioner's pick for coding and long-form text.
API
paidpay-as-you-go, from $1/1M input (Haiku 4.5); small free credits for new users
Cohere
models-api
Enterprise-focused models — Command for generation, Rerank for retrieval.
APIFREE TIER
freemiumfree trial keys; pay-as-you-go from $0.50/1M input tokens
Google AI Studio / Gemini API
models-api
Gemini API with a real free tier — huge context, multimodal, generous limits.
APIFREE TIER
freemiumfree tier (text models); paid from $0.75/1M input (Gemini 3.6 Flash promo till 2027-01)