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DeepSeek API

situationalBlueshift — gaining momentum

Open-weights lab with frontier-ish reasoning at disruptive prices.

api-docs.deepseek.com

journal entry · observed by @whysanesanders · verified 2026-08-15

Unbeatable price-performance for reasoning workloads — R1-class output at a tenth of frontier prices. But it is hosted in China: many companies simply cannot send data there.

Known limitations

  • Data residency is a compliance blocker for many orgs.
  • API capacity and reliability have wobbled under demand.
  • Censorship baked in on some topics.

Facts

pricing
paid
price note
deepseek-chat $0.27/1M input (cache miss), $1.10/1M output
free tier
no
open source
no
api
yes
self-host
no
category
models-api

Models used

deepseek-v3deepseek-r1

Receipts

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