DeepSeek
Founder, Automation Squad
Situational
Ranked #7 of 10 AI assistants & chat
$0
DeepSeek is free for the consumer chat app — no Plus plan, no paywall, and that's not a promotional gimmick, it's the whole model. The company makes its money on API tokens, not subscriptions. Strong reasoning for the price of zero, but it's a Chinese company, and that's a real data-residency and governance conversation your legal team should have before it touches anything sensitive.
Standout feature: The only frontier-class reasoning model here with genuinely no cost to the end user.
The verdict
DeepSeek earns a SquadScore of 57.2/100 (situational), ranking #7 of 10 AI assistants & chat we’ve scored at $0. The only frontier-class reasoning model here with genuinely no cost to the end user.
Scored by the published SquadScore v1.0.0 methodology from vendor-published specs, August 2026.
Pros
- Completely free consumer app with no usage paywall on file uploads or long conversations
- Reasoning performance competitive with much more expensive tools, at zero subscription cost
- API pricing (for developers building on it) is dramatically cheaper than OpenAI or Anthropic's
Cons
- Data governance and residency questions are real, not theoretical — run this past legal before any regulated-industry use
- No enterprise admin tier, SSO, or seat management — there's nothing built for the way a company actually rolls out software
- Image generation is inconsistent: DeepSeek marketed native image generation with V4, but the shipped consumer app has been reported refusing image requests
SquadScore breakdown
How the 57.2/100 was built. Each spec is normalised to a 0–100 quality score, then weighted.
— means the vendor publishes no figure. Blanks drop out of the maths and the remaining weights re-balance — we don’t guess.
Research log. Every figure above traces to a source; where a vendor publishes nothing, we record the gap instead of guessing.1 dated correction
Price is null because there genuinely is no consumer subscription or business seat to price — DeepSeek's only paid product is pay-per-token API access. Context window left null: DeepSeek V4 was announced with a 1M-token window, but multiple July 2026 reports describe a gap between the announced spec and what actually shipped in the consumer app, so a single confirmed figure isn't available. Image generation is inconsistent (see below) — worth re-checking as this is an actively moving target. Rewired to the categories.ts eight-spec schema: securityTier is 'consumer' — reporting confirms DeepSeek's consumer offering has no SSO, audit logs, retention controls or admin workspace; enterprise use effectively means self-hosting or a custom wrapper, out of scope for this consumer-app entry. connectorSupport is 'file upload only' — the consumer app accepts file uploads with no clear paywall, but we found no evidence of app connectors or MCP support. integrations is 0 — recorded as a confirmed zero (no enterprise connector program exists), not null. freeTier remapped from 'Yes' to 'full-featured', consistent with the note above that there's no usage paywall on file uploads or long conversations. appCoverage is 'web + mobile' — no official DeepSeek desktop app exists (only unofficial community wrappers), so this stays below the desktop-equipped assistants.
Corrected Aug 16, 2026no change. DeepSeek still has no per-seat business plan — free web chat plus per-token API billing, with enterprise handled as a custom quote. As with Meta, $0 records the absence of seat pricing rather than a free business tier.
Full specifications
| Price Per Seat | $0 |
|---|---|
| Security & Admin | Consumer |
| Setup Effort | Sign in and go |
| Free Tier Quality | Full-featured |
| Business Integrations | 0 |
| Data & Tool Connections | File upload only |
| Context Window | — |
| Where It Runs | Web + mobile |
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