Does DeepSeek Offer a Free API Tier? What the Official Docs Show

DeepSeek's free chat app and its API are billed differently. You can use the chat app without buying an API plan, but the official API pricing page lists pay-as-you-go token rates rather than a free monthly allowance. DeepSeek also documents a separate granted-balance field, which may show credit assigned to an account. This guide explains the difference, how to check your balance, and which free-use options are available.

There is no free API tier documented anywhere on DeepSeek's official pages: the rate card lists per-token prices, and the chat app at chat.deepseek.com is free without one. The top-ranking English pages claim otherwise — $5 in signup credits (deepseek.com.pk), 1 million free tokens a month (deepseak.org), and paid plan tiers that gate features (deepseek.international) — and none of those numbers appears on any official DeepSeek page. The free mechanism DeepSeek does document is granted balance, a separate wallet from your topped-up money, spent first and able to expire. Check yours with GET /user/balance before believing any page about free credits.

The direct answer

DeepSeek splits into two products and the word “free” only applies to one:

That is the whole picture, and it is worth being blunt about why the API side is not free: every token is billed from a prepaid balance, and an empty balance returns 402, not free usage. If a free tier existed, it would have to live somewhere in that billing model, and the only thing that does is granted balance — covered in section four.

The claims we checked, against the official docs

These are the pages that ranked when we searched “deepseek api free tier” on 3 November 2026. We quote each claim as the page states it, next to what DeepSeek's own documentation says. Read the domain column carefully — it matters more than the numbers.

We are not able to verify what these sites do with accounts, payments or keys — and we are not asserting intent. What we can say is narrower and enough: we could not find support for those figures in DeepSeek's own rate card, and one of the three is not even describing DeepSeek's API endpoint. If you plan capacity around a 60 RPM limit, you are engineering against a number that does not exist.

One check before anything else: the domain

DeepSeek's official developer platform is platform.deepseek.com, the official API base URL is api.deepseek.com, and the official documentation lives at api-docs.deepseek.com. All three sit on the deepseek.com domain that DeepSeek itself operates.

A whole family of third-party domains ranks for DeepSeek queries — deepseek.ai, deepseak.org, deepseek.international, deepseek.com.pk among them. Some publish real information and clearly label themselves as independent; others present official-looking interfaces with their own pricing and their own support addresses. We cannot tell you what each one does behind its signup form. What we can tell you is the mechanical fact: keys created on someone else's platform are keys to their service, prompts sent to their base URL pass through their servers, and DeepSeek's documentation cannot vouch for any of it. Whatever you sign up for, match the domain against the three official ones first.

Granted balance: the closest thing to a free tier

DeepSeek's billing page documents two wallets, and one of them is not your money:

• granted_balance — credit granted to the account, tracked per currency, spent first, and defined as the portion that has not expired.
• topped_up_balance — what you actually paid.

An expiring grant is why an account that had credit yesterday can return 402 today with nothing visibly changed. Check both wallets from a terminal, no dashboard needed:

curl https://api.deepseek.com/user/balance \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${DEEPSEEK_API_KEY}"

What we will not do is tell you how much granted balance a new account gets today, because no official page publishes a figure and we did not open a fresh account to find out. The field is real and documented; the current amounts, if any, are whatever the balance endpoint tells you on the day you look. That is a five-second check, and it beats every blog post including this one.

Ways to actually use DeepSeek models for $0

Three of them, with honest trade-offs:

1. The chat app. chat.deepseek.com and the mobile app run the current models free, no plan attached. For learning, drafting and testing ideas, this is the free tier people are actually looking for — it just is not an API.
2. The open weights. DeepSeek publishes model weights openly on GitHub and Hugging Face, and they run on your own hardware through tools like Ollama, vLLM or LM Studio. The software is free; the GPU is not. This is the only route where your prompts never leave your machine, and the only one with no rate limit but your own hardware.
3. Third-party hosts. Various providers serve DeepSeek models with their own free quotas or free variants. These are real, and the caveats are real too: the host sets the limits, sees your prompts, and can change the deal at any time. That is a different service with a different privacy story, not DeepSeek's free tier.

If you are about to pay instead

The API is cheaper than the confusion around it. The published rates, per million tokens on deepseek-flash: $0.15 input (cache miss) and $0.60 output off-peak, doubled at peak hours; a cache hit drops input to $0.003, which is 50 times cheaper than a miss and applies automatically to repeated prompt prefixes. One ordinary exchange — a 200-word question, a 500-word answer — works out to well under a tenth of a cent at peak rates on our pricing page, where the full table and the timezone conversion for peak hours live.

So the practical answer to “how do I get DeepSeek's API free” is: check your granted balance, use the chat app for anything that does not need code, and if you are paying, the smallest realistic bill is likely smaller than the time spent hunting for a free tier that the official docs do not offer.

Frequently asked questions

Does DeepSeek give new API accounts $5 in free credits?

No official DeepSeek page documents a signup credit, and we did not receive or observe one on our own account. The $5 figure appears on third-party pages and does not check out against the official rate card. Check GET /user/balance on your own account - a granted_balance field, if present, is the only documented free credit mechanism.

Is there a monthly free token allowance for the DeepSeek API?

No. The official pricing page bills every token from a prepaid balance and lists no monthly allowance. An empty balance returns a 402 error, not free usage.

Is deepseek.international DeepSeek's official site?

DeepSeek's official developer platform is platform.deepseek.com, the official API base URL is api.deepseek.com, and its documentation is at api-docs.deepseek.com. deepseek.international uses a different base URL and its own support address, and describes plan tiers that do not exist in DeepSeek's official documentation.

How do I check if my account has free balance?

Call GET https://api.deepseek.com/user/balance with your API key. The response returns is_available plus granted_balance and topped_up_balance per currency. DeepSeek spends the granted balance first, and only unexpired grants count.

Sources and what we could not test

We did not open a new DeepSeek account on 3 November 2026, so we cannot say from direct experience whether signup grants are issued this week - we can only say no official page documents one, and the balance endpoint is the authoritative check. The third-party claims were read from the linked pages on the same day and may have changed since.