Le Chat (Mistral)
The European choice — capable, fast, and EU-hosted.
DeepSeek review
Frontier-class reasoning at a fraction of the price — with caveats.
DeepSeek (China) Free tier Open weights API
At a glance
| Developer | DeepSeek (China) |
|---|---|
| Current model | DeepSeek V3 / R1 family |
| Free tier | Yes — generous free chat access |
| Paid from | API-priced (very low per-token costs) |
| Plan ladder | Free chat · pay-as-you-go API |
| Context window | Large |
| Multimodal | Primarily text-focused |
| Public API | ✔ Yes |
| Open weights | ✔ Yes |
| Data & privacy | Data processed in China — a hard blocker for many UK businesses and public-sector users |
| Official site | https://www.deepseek.com |
Pros & cons
What's good
- Remarkable capability-per-pound — strong reasoning and coding at minimal cost
- Open-weight releases you can self-host for full data control
What to watch
- China-based data processing rules it out for sensitive or regulated work
- Sparser ecosystem, integrations and polish than US rivals
Ad slot: 2020202020
Who is DeepSeek for?
DeepSeek tends to suit people who want best value / free use, coding & development, open-source / self-host. There's a free tier, so the cheapest way to decide is simply to try it.
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Alternatives to consider
HuggingChat
Free, open-source chat with the best open models.
Claude
The quality pick — leads coding benchmarks and long-document work.