DeepSeek
The open-weights shock — frontier-class reasoning you can run on your own hardware, at a price that rewrites the spreadsheet.
What it is, and why we use it.
DeepSeek broke the assumption that frontier reasoning requires closed models and premium prices. Its open-weight releases (V-series and R-series reasoning models) perform near the top of the leaderboards while costing a fraction of closed rivals — and because the weights are public, you can run them entirely inside your own infrastructure.
DeepSeek is our cost-engineering and data-sovereignty card. High-volume classification, summarisation and extraction pipelines run on it for a tenth of the closed-model bill; privacy-critical clients get it self-hosted so no token ever leaves their VPC. Senior engineers review its output exactly as they would any model's.
DeepSeek vs ChatGPT / GPT vs Claude.
The open-weights challenger against the two closed incumbents — when sovereignty and cost beat polish, and when they don't.
| Dimension | DeepSeek | ChatGPT / GPT | Claude |
|---|---|---|---|
| Openness | Open weights — download and run anywhere | Closed API; some open releases | Closed API |
| Cost at volume | Cheapest by a wide margin; free if self-hosted | Premium | Premium |
| Data sovereignty | Total — your GPUs, your VPC, your rules | Vendor-hosted (Azure regions help) | Vendor-hosted (Bedrock/Vertex help) |
| Reasoning quality | Frontier-class on R-series | Frontier | Frontier |
| Multimodal & tooling | Thinner — text-first, fewer integrations | Richest toolbox | Strong, engineering-centric |
| Ops burden | Yours — GPUs, serving, scaling | None | None |
DeepSeek wins when
- Token volume is huge and margins are thin
- Regulation or policy forbids data leaving your infrastructure
- You want to fine-tune weights for a narrow domain
ChatGPT / GPT wins when
- You need multimodal breadth and a managed service
- Time-to-market beats infrastructure control
- The team has no GPU-ops appetite
Claude wins when
- Agentic coding quality is the deciding factor
- Long-context reliability is non-negotiable
- You want frontier output with zero serving overhead
DeepSeek proved open weights belong on every serious shortlist. We use it where economics or sovereignty decide the question — with the same rule as every model in this list: it multiplies a senior engineer, it doesn't replace one.
Thinking about DeepSeek?
Tell us what you're building — we'll tell you honestly whether DeepSeek is the right tool for it.