DeepSeek Review

What DeepSeek is and who builds it

DeepSeek is an AI assistant and a family of large language models built by DeepSeek, a Chinese research company based in Hangzhou and backed by the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer. It was founded by Liang Wenfeng, and for its first year it was known mainly to researchers who followed open-weight model releases. That changed in early 2025 when its reasoning model, DeepSeek R1, was released with open weights and performance close to the best closed models of the time, at a fraction of the reported training and serving cost. The release moved markets, dominated tech coverage for weeks, and made DeepSeek a household name well beyond China.

For an Indian user, the practical summary is this. DeepSeek gives you a strong reasoning and coding model, free on the web and in its apps, plus an API priced far below anything from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, plus downloadable open weights you can run on your own infrastructure. Those are three genuinely attractive things. Set against them is a real and unresolved data governance question, which this review takes seriously rather than glossing over.

Key features in depth

Chain-of-thought reasoning you can actually read. DeepSeek's reasoning models show their working before giving a final answer. On a hard maths problem, a multi-step financial calculation or a tricky debugging question, you can watch it consider an approach, reject it and try another. This is educationally useful in a way that a bare answer is not, and it makes errors easier to catch because you can see where the logic went wrong.

Coding strength. DeepSeek is unusually good at code for a free tool. It writes clean Python, JavaScript, Java and Go, handles SQL well, and explains unfamiliar code clearly. Developers who have compared it with paid assistants generally place it in the same conversation as the frontier models for routine work, while acknowledging that the very best closed models still pull ahead on large, messy, multi-file tasks.

Open weights. Several DeepSeek models, including the reasoning models and distilled smaller versions, are published under permissive licences and available on Hugging Face. You can download them, fine-tune them and run them entirely on your own hardware. This matters enormously for the privacy question below, because a model running on your own server in Mumbai sends nothing to anyone.

Very low API pricing. DeepSeek's published API rates have been an order of magnitude below the mainstream Western providers, with additional discounts for cached context and, at times, off-peak usage. For an Indian startup where the difference between a viable and unviable unit economic is the per-token cost, this is not a marginal consideration.

Web search integration. The chat interface can search the web and cite sources, which helps with current questions, though the source mix is noticeably lighter on Indian publications than Google's or Perplexity's.

Multilingual capability. DeepSeek handles English and Chinese best. Hindi is functional for translation and simple conversation but not strong, and other Indian languages are weaker.

Pricing explained, in rupees

DeepSeek's consumer product is free. The web chat at chat.deepseek.com and the official Android and iOS apps cost nothing, with no message caps of the kind Grok and ChatGPT impose, though the service does slow down or refuse new sessions under heavy load. There is no consumer subscription tier to buy, which is unusual and is part of why adoption spread so fast.

The API is pay-as-you-go, billed per million tokens in US dollars. At the rates DeepSeek has published, input tokens have been priced in the region of a few tens of US cents per million, with output tokens a few dollars per million for the reasoning models, and a steep discount when the same context is reused. Converting at roughly Rs 85 to the dollar, a million input tokens can cost under Rs 50, which is an indicative figure and changes when DeepSeek revises pricing. Compare that with mainstream Western APIs where the equivalent figure is often ten to thirty times higher.

Running the open weights yourself has no licence fee but real infrastructure cost. The full-size models need serious GPU capacity, so most Indian teams that self-host use the smaller distilled versions, or rent GPUs from an Indian cloud provider, or use one of the several Western and Indian hosting providers that serve DeepSeek weights from servers outside China. That last option deserves emphasis, because it lets you get the model without the data residency problem.

How DeepSeek compares with ChatGPT and Qwen

Real workflows where DeepSeek fits

A Hyderabad developer at a bootstrapped SaaS company uses the DeepSeek API for internal features such as summarising support tickets and generating test cases, keeping a more expensive model only for the customer-facing feature where quality is most visible. The bill difference funds another month of runway.

A student preparing for JEE or a similar exam uses the free chat for physics and mathematics problems, specifically because the visible reasoning steps make it possible to find where their own working diverged. This is one of the better free study aids available in India today.

A startup on a tight budget self-hosts a distilled DeepSeek model on a rented GPU with an Indian provider, so that customer data never leaves the country. This is more work than calling an API, but it turns a compliance blocker into a solved problem.

A Bengaluru data team uses DeepSeek to write and explain complex SQL and to convert analyst questions into queries, treating it as a productivity tool on non-sensitive schemas only.

A Chennai agency uses it for first-draft English marketing copy and for translating briefs, then edits heavily, because the English prose is competent but slightly stiff.

A freelance developer in Pune uses the free chat as a full-time pair programmer, which at zero rupees a month is difficult to argue with.

Limitations and the data question, honestly

The hosted DeepSeek service stores user data on servers in China. DeepSeek's own privacy policy says so. Chinese law, including the Data Security Law and the National Intelligence Law, creates obligations for companies to cooperate with state authorities in ways that have no direct equivalent in Indian or European law. That is not an accusation of wrongdoing by DeepSeek; it is a description of the legal environment its hosted service operates in, and it is the single most important thing an Indian professional should weigh before pasting anything confidential into it.

Several governments have acted on this. Regulators and ministries in Italy, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan and elsewhere restricted or blocked the DeepSeek app on official devices during 2025, and a number of large enterprises have added it to internal blocklists. In India, the Ministry of Finance was reported in early 2025 to have advised staff against using AI tools including DeepSeek and ChatGPT on office computers, on confidentiality grounds. Separately, Indian officials have spoken about hosting DeepSeek's open models on Indian servers, which is precisely the distinction that matters: the weights and the hosted service are different things with different risk profiles.

So the practical guidance is straightforward. Use the free hosted chat for study, for public information, for code that is not proprietary, and for anything you would be comfortable posting publicly. Do not use it for client data, customer PII, unpublished financials, legal documents or employer source code unless your organisation has cleared it. If you want the model's quality on sensitive work, use the open weights through a provider hosting them outside China, or self-host.

Beyond privacy, there are ordinary product limitations. The service goes down or degrades under load more often than the big commercial platforms. There is no meaningful enterprise tier, no SLA to speak of, thin admin tooling and limited support. Hindi output is mediocre and other Indian languages are worse. The model applies Chinese content restrictions and will avoid or deflect politically sensitive topics concerning China, which is a straightforward fact about the hosted service rather than a moral judgement. Image generation, voice and document handling are all behind ChatGPT and Gemini. And because it is free and popular, the internet is full of fake DeepSeek apps and sites, so download only from the official domain and official app stores.

How to get started, step by step

1. Go to chat.deepseek.com or install the official DeepSeek app from the Play Store or App Store. Check the publisher name; imitation apps are common.
2. Sign in with email or Google. No payment details are required for the free chat.
3. Turn on the deep thinking or reasoning toggle for maths, logic and code. Leave it off for quick lookups, since it is slower.
4. Turn on web search when you need current information, and click through the citations rather than trusting the summary.
5. Decide your personal data line before you start, and write it down. A simple rule works well: nothing goes in that you would not put in a public tweet.
6. For a product, sign up at platform.deepseek.com, generate an API key and set a spend cap. The API is OpenAI-compatible, so existing client libraries work with a base URL change.
7. If you need the quality without Chinese hosting, pull the open weights from Hugging Face and serve them yourself, or use a hosting provider that runs them outside China. Confirm in writing where inference actually happens.
8. If you work in an Indian bank, insurer, listed company or government body, ask your compliance team before using it at all, because internal policy may already prohibit it.