What the DeepSeek family is
DeepSeek's V3 and R1 models are the most requested reasoning-capable open weights, and several providers list them on free or trial-credit tiers.
Providers offering DeepSeek on free terms
5 of the 25 providers detailed in this catalog list at least one DeepSeek model. Because DeepSeek publishes the weights rather than the service, the model id can be identical across all of them while the free allowance is not.
| Provider | Free access | Published limits | Card | Matching models |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SambaNova Cloud | Provider free tier | 20 requests per minute, 20 requests per day | Not required | DeepSeek-V3.1 |
| Hugging Face Inference Providers | Provider free tier | Published as a credit balance | Not required | deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-0324 |
| SiliconFlow | Provider free tier | 1000 requests per minute | Not required | deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1 |
| Nebius Token Factory | Metered access | 60 requests per minute | Not required | deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3 |
| DeepInfra | Metered access | Enforced but not published | Not required | deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3 |
How the free terms actually differ
- SambaNova Cloud — The Free Tier applies whenever no payment method is linked to the account.
- Hugging Face Inference Providers — Signed-in free users receive $0.10 in monthly Inference Provider credits (Hugging Face notes this is subject to change); PRO users receive $2.00 and Team or Enterprise organizations $2.00 per seat.
- SiliconFlow — Rate limits for free models are fixed; paid models are tiered by monthly spend and start at tier L0 with 1,000 RPM and 40,000 TPM.
- Nebius Token Factory — Limits are dynamic with a published baseline of 60 RPM and 400,000 TPM.
- DeepInfra — The official pricing page lists a per-million-token input and output price for every serving model and does not describe a free allowance or publish request-rate limits.
Picking one
3 of these 5 publish a fixed request count; the rest state a tier or a credit balance instead, which means the only honest answer to "how much is free" is the one in their console. 5 take no credit card. 4 answer a cross-origin browser request, so a key for those can be checked from the browser checker with nothing installed.
A model id that matches DeepSeek is not a promise that the free tier includes it. Providers move individual models between paid and free without changing the id, which is why each row links to the provider page carrying that provider's own wording and the date it was read.