Open-weight models that punch far above their price
Visit DeepSeek →DeepSeek built its reputation by releasing open-weight models that perform close to the frontier labs while costing a fraction to run. It is unusually strong at mathematics and competitive programming, and because the weights are published you can self-host rather than depending on someone else's API.
Developers and researchers who want frontier-adjacent reasoning at low cost, and anyone who needs to self-host for privacy or compliance reasons.
The consumer product is plainer than ChatGPT or Claude, with a thinner ecosystem of extras. Service capacity has been inconsistent during demand spikes.
Free web chat; API billed per token at notably low rates; weights are free to download.
If this is not the right fit, these are the closest options.