DeepSeek AI Review
TechRadar Pro, Monday, July 13th, 2026
DeepSeek's V4 models deliver strong performance at very low API cost, but Chinese data residency and censorship are serious business risks.
DeepSeek offers a free, unlimited chat app and an aggressively priced API built on MoE models: V4 Flash (284B total / 13B active) at $0.14 per million input tokens and V4 Pro (1.6T / 49B active), both with a 1M token context window and MIT-licensed open weights for self-hosting.
Testing found clean code output, accurate long-document summaries and a genuinely useful Expert Mode reasoning path, with cached input tokens 90% cheaper and off-peak discounts up to 75%.
The drawbacks are non-technical: data is stored on mainland China servers subject to Chinese law, politically sensitive prompts return evasive answers, and Italy blocked the service in January 2025. There is also no image generation or understanding, and support is limited to Discord and email.