DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI lab whose open-weight models deliver strong reasoning and coding at very low prices, making it popular for high-volume and budget use.

You can use it via the DeepSeek app/web or self-host the open weights.

DeepSeek matters most on cost. Its models offer strong reasoning and coding at prices far below the leading US labs, which makes it a practical choice for high-volume API work, and because the weights are open you can self-host it when data must stay on your own infrastructure.

The hosted service is operated from China, so anything sensitive — customer data, anything under India's DPDP Act — needs its data policy read carefully, or should run on self-hosted weights instead. The consumer app is also less polished than the big US assistants.

If you want a similar cost profile with a different hosting footprint, Mistral and Qwen are the other major open-weight families. If budget is not the constraint, a frontier hosted model may save you engineering time.