If you are thinking about investing in the newly launched AI model DeepSeek, you must know its pricing details and whether it provides good value for money.
However, DeepSeek doesn’t follow the regular subscription structure. You are charged according to your token usage, which can be a little confusing if you aren’t familiar with the tool.
Plus, due to the buzz around DeepSeek, a lot of incorrect information about it is scattered around the internet. It can be difficult to understand how much you will have to spend to get the right DeepSeek plan for yourself.
In today’s article, I will break down the technicalities of DeepSeek pricing, including:
- The pricing tiers.
- The input and output capacity you get with each.
This will help you decide whether DeepSeek is the most cost-effective AI chat assistant for your needs. And in case it doesn’t fit your budget or requirements, I have another excellent AI solution for you as well.
DeepSeek Pricing Plans
DeepSeek has disrupted the AI space with its open-source and cheaper alternative to ChatGPT. The pricing is based on token usage, with expenses calculated by multiplying the number of tokens by the respective price.
Before we dive into the pricing, let me help you understand what tokens are and how they are calculated:
DeepSeek uses tokens as the basic unit for its model to represent natural language text. They calculate billing on how many tokens you have used.
According to DeepSeek’s website, “a Chinese word, an English word, a number, or a symbol is counted as a token.”
The conversion ratio of tokens and the number of characters are like this:
- 1 English character = 0.3 token.
- 1 Chinese character = 0.6 token.
Does DeepSeek Offer Free Tools?
DeepSeek-V3 offers a free demo that you can access instantly through your web browser.
You can also download and run it locally for commercial use, as DeepSeek provides an open-source implementation. The source code is available on GitHub.
Other than that, DeepSeek offers two pricing models:
- DeepSeek Chat: $0.07 for 1 million token input with cache hit, $0.27 for 1 million token input with cache miss, and $1.10 for 1 million token output.
- DeepSeek Reasoner: $0.14 for 1 million token input with cache hit, $0.55 for 1 million token input with cache miss, and $2.19 for 1 million token output.
Despite this, I found that DeepSeek uses different tokenizations for different models. So, the conversion ratios may vary.
The company is currently offering discounted rates for the DeepSeek Chat model until February 8, 2025, 16:00 (UTC). Afterward, standard pricing will resume.
However, let me inform you that the DeepSeek R1 model isn’t included in this promotional discount.
DeepSeek Chat
The DeepSeek chat model is the less expensive version, especially suitable for beginners. You get a context length of 64K which is the same for the other model as well. There is no max threshold for Chain of Thought (CoT) tokens. However, the max output token for this model is set at 8K.
I could grab the discounted price, which cost me $0.014 for 1 million token input with cache hit, $0.14 for 1 million token input with cache miss, and $0.28 for 1 million token output.
However, if you start using it after February 8th, 2025, you will have to pay the regular price.
Here are the features you get with the DeepSeek Chat model:
- Access on Windows, Android, and iOS devices.
- “DeepThink” mode for step-by-step reasoning for complex queries (only for the DeepSeek-R1 model).
- Chat features like ChatGPT.
DeepSeek Reasoner
The DeepSeek Reasoner model stood out to me for its advanced reasoning capabilities. The pricing here is also based on how many tokens you use, including all tokens from the CoT process and the final answer.
While the context length and max output token are the same in both models, DeepSeek Reasoner has a maximum CoT token number of 32K.
For DeepSeek Reasoner, I had to pay $0.14 for 1 million token input with cache hit, $0.55 for 1 million token input with cache miss, and $2.19 for 1 million token output.
DeepSeek Reasoner offers the following features:
- Multi-round Conversation.
- Generates multiple Chains of Thought, enhancing the accuracy of its responses.
Want a More Versatile Alternative to DeepSeek?
While DeepSeek costs lower in comparison to ChatGPT, it’s still riddled with several problems.
First of all, there is a huge security concern, especially if your business deals with sensitive internal and customer data. Since the systems learn through user inputs, there is a risk of data leakage.
Plus, it’s an open-source system, so anyone can use it for their own tools. That means that developers can add elements that save your information for later modeling.
Such issues hint at compliance issues outside China and can potentially land you in expensive legal trouble.
Users also often complain about the results being inaccurate and inconsistent. The outputs are sometimes biased, so you won’t get the complete picture in the results.
For example, X user Cyrus John uploaded two screenshots that show how DeepSeek often produces results that sound more like Chinese propaganda than hard facts.
You may have to fact-check certain information before using them, which requires extra time.
Plus, if you want a tool for your team, there are other DeepSeek alternatives. For example, our solution, Team-GPT offers another accurate, and cost-effective AI tool. Here, You can:
- Customize it according to your company’s needs.
- Drive holistic adoption throughout the organization since it’s very easy to use.
Here are some Team-GPT features that can meet your needs efficiently:
Team-GPT Features
No company can grow without an efficient team. That’s why Team-GPT is built with seamless collaboration in mind.
From agility to customizability, our AI solution offers everything your team needs from an efficient AI-driven workspace.
Here are the features Team-GPT offers:
Feature #1: Customizable AI Toolkit
Team-GPT’s AI toolkit lets you handle both simple and complex tasks easily. You can customize each tool according to the nuances of your operations.
Our toolkit includes:
- AI pages that let your team curate content from start to finish. The process is fast and ensures every generated result is aligned with your target audience and business goals. You can edit the results as well.
- You get a prompt library with over 100 ready-to-use and customizable cases. These are diverse enough to fit the common industry needs. Plus, it helps our system understand your usage patterns and needs so that we can adjust our offering to your team’s needs.
- You can build your own custom prompt libraries as well. Your team can save their most-used prompts, queries, and instructions for quick access. This also lets our ML algorithms adapt to your specific needs for tailored and highly relevant conversations.
- Team-GPT offers access to Dall-E, which means that you can generate any images you need directly on our platform. No back and forths between multiple tools.
- You can choose personas like travel expert, BPO manager, Financial Advisor, etc. Our platform will offer you expert insights and personalize content accordingly.
- Our doc and image analysis feature lets you assess your text-based and visual content carefully. You get detailed insights and suggestions to make your content more impactful.
Feature #2: Use Multiple AI Models
One of the best and unique features of Team-GPT is that it’s model-agnostic. That’s why you can use multiple models like ChatGPT, Azure, Gemini, Claude, and even open-source LLMs like Anyscale, Mistral, and LLaMa — all in the same platform simultaneously.
This way, your team can switch between multiple models and compare results without closing or switching tabs.
Our custom plan even lets you integrate your own LLM code into our system so that you can fill your unique business requirements and achieve task goals perfectly.
Feature #3: Real-Time Collaboration
AI models like DeepSeek don’t let teams collaborate on the platform — but Team-GPT does. In every chat, your team members can:
- Add their prompts, ask questions, and switch AI models.
- Leave reactions and comments on others’ prompts and outputs. This enables a free flow of open discussion, ideas, and brainstorming.
- Run A/B testing with the fork chat feature, where team members explore different outcomes without messing up the original conversation.
- Organize chats in different folders and subfolders for quick access.
Feature #4: Top-Notch Data Security
As I said before, security threats are one of the greatest concerns when using DeepSeek. With Team-GPT, you won’t face such problems. We abide by all military-grade security standards so that you can run your operations with our AI worry-free.
We provide security features:
- Data encryption.
- Detailed audit logs.
- Workspace administration.
- Custom permission settings.
Plus, we don’t train our system on your data. So, there is no fear of data leakage. If you buy the Enterprise plan, you can access additional security features like on-premise and cloud deployment. These are built specifically to accommodate the unique data and privacy requirements of large businesses.
Feature #5: Usage Analytics
Team-GPT offers usage analytics where you can track:
- Overall Chat Efficiency: Shows the effectiveness of the chat sessions across your workspace.
- Real-Time Chat Efficiency Tracker: Tracks your context limit live while you are having a conversation with the system. The tracker will turn yellow or red when you are close or already approached the limit. It’s an indication that you may need to fork the chat.
- Active Users: Tracks the number of active users over a selected period to understand whether your team is adopting the system as per your expectations.
- Chat Efficiency by User: Sorts each user’s messages into high, moderate, or low-efficiency categories based on token usage.
- Token Distribution Overview: Helps understand the balance between input tokens and output tokens.
- Token Usage by User: Measures how many tokens each member used and their tokens per message ratio. It helps you identify the best performance when it comes to AI usage.
- User Engagement: Offers a broader perspective on user activity, tracking the total number of chats initiated and messages sent by all team members.
Feature #6: On-Premise Deployment
From day one, we built Team-GPT with enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance.
It is possible to create your own version of Team-GPT but deploy it on your own hosting infrastructure.
Be it on-premise or on a private cloud; your consulting team will hold all your data while using all your preferred AI models.
The software is deployed on your servers and lets you effortlessly onboard 1000s of employees into the platform.
With Team-GPT Enterprise, you can:
- Retain complete control and flexibility over your data.
- Apply security filters and have complete control of the platform with advanced admin rights and report access.
- Prioritize privacy and protection, as Team-GPT is committed to all GDPR compliance standards and holds SOC II and ISO 27001 certifications.
Team-GPT Pricing
Team-GPT has two pricing plans:
Business: The business plan will cost you $18 per user/month if you take our annual subscription. You can renew monthly plans at $20/month. If you run a small or mid-sized business, it’s ideal for you. Here is what you get with our business plan:
- Access to the latest Anthropic and OpenAI models.
- Customizable AI toolkit complete with prompt library, image generation, and AI editor.
- Customizable instructions and co-create with the AI for Pages.
- Advanced usage and data analytics reports.
- Practical application for a variety of use cases.
Enterprise: The Enterprise plan is perfect for big business and offers custom pricing if you have a minimum of 150 users. Here is what it offers:
- Tool deployment on private cloud or on-premises.
- Access to custom models.
- Personalized AI toolkit.
- Unlimited workspace for your entire team.
- Premium management for key accounts.
- Enterprise-grade security measures.
Not only that, but both plans give you the option to bring your own API Keys for models like ChatGPT, Azure OpenAI Service, Gemini, and Claude.
Improve Data Security and Collaboration With Team-GPT
While DeepSeek is getting a lot of traction at the moment, its drawbacks are too big to ignore. So, choose Team-GPT if you want to:
- Leverage multiple AI systems in a single platform without draining your budget.
- Foster better teamwork with collaborative AI chat space.
- Align the AI solution perfectly with your unique business needs.
- Facilitate company-wide adoption.
- Guarantee data security and compliance.
Book a demo today and let our AI experts show you how Team-GPT can improve your team’s productivity with our all-in-one AI platform.
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Iliya Valchanov
Iliya teaches 1.4M students on the topics of AI, data science, and machine learning. He is a serial entrepreneur, who has co-founded Team-GPT, 3veta, and 365 Data Science. Iliya’s latest project, Team-GPT is helping companies like Maersk, EY, Charles Schwab, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, Columbia University adopt AI in the most private and secure way.