DeepSeek
Frontier-adjacent reasoning, free, which repriced the whole floor.
why this verdict
Keep it — OpenAI has not replaced it
OpenAI's version overlaps, but does not finish the AI assistants job, so this one is still worth keeping open.
- A named launch, not a vibe named, unlinked
- Competing frontier labs. OpenAI, January 20, 2025 — no announcement link recorded yet.
- How much of the job it covers not the job editorial call
- Parts of it. The job still needs the tool to get finished.
- Is there a free way to do it? yes
- 3 of 3 listed replacements have a usable free tier: ChatGPT, Claude and Google Gemini.
- What the call is worth nothing to cancel
- No paid entry tier tracked, so there is no subscription to cancel.
- Threatened by
- OpenAI
- Since
- January 20, 2025
- List price
- free
- Per year
- —
The backstory
DeepSeek is a Chinese lab whose reasoning models rival far more expensive rivals while being free to chat with and cheap to call by API. It survived not by hiding from competing labs but by repricing the whole floor: once frontier-adjacent reasoning is nearly free, the business model of wrapping someone else's model and charging thirty dollars a month collapses. DeepSeek is less a victim here than one of the forces killing thin AI wrappers.
Escape hatches
The flagship assistant with a capable free tier
chatgpt.com open_in_newAnthropic's assistant, strong at reasoning and code
claude.ai open_in_newFree multimodal assistant tied into Google
gemini.google.com open_in_new3 of 3 replacements have a usable free tier.