# API2D vs DeepSeek

API2D records 214 monthly visits with -91.3% month-over-month growth and Paid pricing. DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% growth and Freemium pricing.

| Metric | [API2D](https://openaitools.app/tool/api2d-com) | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.api2d.com | https://www.deepseek.com |
| Categories | AI API, Large Language Models (LLMs), AI Developer Tools | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot |
| Pricing Model | Paid | Freemium |
| Monthly Visits | 214 | 372,761,591 |
| MoM Growth Rate | -91.3% | +4.3% |
| Primary Market | Taiwan | China |
| Direct Visits | 86 | 291,585,405 |
| Review Score | 3.8 | 4.8 |
| Saved Count | 4 | 44 |
| Supported Platforms | Website | Website |

## API2D

API2D is a payment-and-routing layer that sits in front of the world's major language and image models. Instead of managing billing with each provider separately, you register an API2D account, top it up, copy the issued key and paste it into any client that supports a custom API base URL. Because the interface mirrors OpenAI's own specification, most existing tools, SDKs and self-hosted chat UIs work without code changes.

The platform bills in points (P) rather than a fixed monthly subscription, so cost tracks actual token consumption. According to API2D's own documentation, overall pricing is kept at roughly 1.5x the underlying provider's official rate, with a minimum per-request charge and free cached responses. Streamed GPT-4 replies are billed differently because they hold a connection open, and media-heavy endpoints add a modest bandwidth fee.

Beyond pure relay, API2D layers on value that a raw endpoint does not offer: response caching, retrieval-augmented search, drawing tools and an agent/reseller program that lets larger accounts create and price their own sub-keys. It is aimed at Chinese-speaking developers and enthusiasts who want frictionless, domestically payable access to frontier models. For anyone evaluating it, remember that API2D is an independent third party and not affiliated with OpenAI, Anthropic or the other model vendors.

**Pricing & Plans:** Pay-as-you-go in points (P); overall cost roughly 1.5x official provider pricing, with free cache hits and a minimum per-call charge. Recharge via WeChat, Alipay, Chinese bank cards or Stripe. Points expire 180 days after your last top-up.

- **OpenAI-compatible endpoint:** One base URL and key work with virtually any app, SDK or self-hosted chat client that supports a custom API address.
- **Multi-provider model access:** Route requests to OpenAI models, Claude, Stability diffusion, Azure TTS and vector database services from a single account.
- **Points-based billing:** Consumption is metered in points with a published multiplier, so you pay for what you use rather than a flat subscription.
- **Free response caching:** Identical request bodies return cached answers for free for 24 hours, and a header can disable caching when freshness matters.
- **Reseller and grouping tools:** Larger accounts can batch-create keys, set default models and resell access through their own pricing pages.

**Strengths:** Works with the large ecosystem of OpenAI-compatible tools out of the box; Point-based billing means low commitment and granular cost control; Response caching can make repeated queries effectively free; Built-in enhancements (search, knowledge base, drawing) go beyond a plain relay

**Limitations:** Cost runs above direct provider pricing once the multiplier applies; Points expire 180 days after the last top-up, so balances need periodic renewal; No monthly plan — heavy users must estimate spend from token usage; Pricing calculation is complex because of minimum charges and bandwidth fees

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/api2d-com.md)

## DeepSeek

DeepSeek (Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd.) is a frontier AI research organization that disrupted the global LLM market by pairing open-weight transparency with breakthrough Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and reinforcement-learning reasoning efficiency. Following the landmark releases of DeepSeek-V3 and the peer-reviewed DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model, DeepSeek introduced the DeepSeek-V4 generation in 2026—featuring a hybrid attention architecture and a native 1-million-token context window across DeepSeek-V4-Pro (1.6T total parameters, 49B active per token) and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (284B total parameters, 13B active per token).

Users can interact with DeepSeek in three ways: completely free through the consumer web portal (chat.deepseek.com) and mobile apps with one-click toggles for deep thinking and live web search; via DeepSeek's hosted, OpenAI-compatible developer API; or by self-hosting DeepSeek's open-weight checkpoints (including V3, R1, Prover-V2, and distilled Qwen/Llama variants) on private infrastructure. The models excel at competitive mathematics, algorithm design, repository-level software engineering, and structured data extraction, with automatic context caching on the API that slashes repeated prompt costs by over 95%.

In late 2026, DeepSeek remains the price-performance benchmark for developers and automation workflows. While the consumer chat interface remains free without a mandatory $20/month subscription tier, the developer API transitioned in late 2026 to two primary endpoints—`deepseek-flash` and `deepseek-v4-pro`—with time-of-day pricing. Off-peak API calls cost just $0.15 per million input tokens ($0.003 on cache hits) and $0.60 per million output tokens on Flash, and $0.66 input / $1.98 output on V4-Pro, making it a fraction of the cost of comparable Western frontier models.

**Pricing & Plans:** Free web and mobile chat app at chat.deepseek.com; pay-as-you-go OpenAI-compatible API with off-peak rates at $0.15/1M input ($0.003 cache hit) and $0.60/1M output for deepseek-flash (V4.1-Flash), and $0.66/1M input ($0.022 cache hit) and $1.98/1M output for deepseek-v4-pro (peak weekday UTC hours bill at 2x).

- **DeepSeek-V4 Hybrid Attention & 1M Context:** Leverages a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture (49B active parameters out of 1.6T on V4-Pro) to process up to 1 million tokens with minimal latency and memory overhead.
- **Transparent Chain-of-Thought Reasoning:** Pioneered by DeepSeek-R1 and integrated into V3.2 and V4 thinking modes, exposing step-by-step self-verification for complex math, logic, and code debugging.
- **Automatic Context Caching & Off-Peak API Pricing:** Drops input token costs to $0.003/1M on Flash and $0.022/1M on V4-Pro for cache hits, with 50% lower rates during off-peak UTC hours.
- **Free Consumer Web & Mobile Assistant:** Provides free access at chat.deepseek.com and on iOS/Android with document uploads, reasoning mode, and web search without paywalling core models.
- **Open-Weight Ecosystem & Self-Hosting Freedom:** Offers open weights for DeepSeek-V3, R1, Distill variants, and Prover models on Hugging Face and GitHub so enterprises can deploy within air-gapped environments.

**Strengths:** Completely free consumer web and mobile app with deep reasoning and web search included; Ultra-low API token rates ($0.15/$0.60 on Flash, $0.66/$1.98 on V4-Pro off-peak) with up to 98% savings on cached inputs; Drop-in OpenAI API compatibility makes switching or routing between models effortless; Strong open-weight lineage allows teams to self-host or fine-tune models without vendor lock-in

**Limitations:** Hosted API and web app store data on servers in China, prompting compliance restrictions for some Western enterprises and government agencies; Peak-hour API pricing (01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC on weekdays) doubles per-token costs compared to off-peak rates; Lacks native voice mode, video generation, and productivity suite integrations offered by ChatGPT and Google Gemini

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek.md)

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do API2D and DeepSeek compare in monthly traffic?

API2D has 214 monthly visits, while DeepSeek has 372,761,591. Traffic estimates describe audience size, not product quality.

### How do their growth rates compare?

API2D has a month-over-month growth rate of -91.3%; DeepSeek has +4.3%.

### How does pricing compare?

API2D: Paid. Pay-as-you-go in points (P); overall cost roughly 1.5x official provider pricing, with free cache hits and a minimum per-call charge. Recharge via WeChat, Alipay, Chinese bank cards or Stripe. Points expire 180 days after your last top-up. DeepSeek: Freemium. Free web and mobile chat app at chat.deepseek.com; pay-as-you-go OpenAI-compatible API with off-peak rates at $0.15/1M input ($0.003 cache hit) and $0.60/1M output for deepseek-flash (V4.1-Flash), and $0.66/1M input ($0.022 cache hit) and $1.98/1M output for deepseek-v4-pro (peak weekday UTC hours bill at 2x).

## Alternatives

| # | Tool Name | Monthly Visits | MoM Growth Rate | Pricing Model | Summary | Profile (Markdown) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| 1 | [ChatGPT](https://openaitools.app/tool/chatgpt-4) | 6,048,022,723 | +2.2% | Freemium | Provides stronger multi-modal reasoning and agentic tools, but lacks DeepSeek's ultra-low-cost API pricing. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/chatgpt-4.md) |
| 2 | [Google Gemini](https://openaitools.app/tool/gemini-gemini-advanced) | 2,637,398,242 | -0.1% | Freemium | Offers an enormous context window and deep Google ecosystem integration, but feels less specialized for pure reasoning tasks. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/gemini-gemini-advanced.md) |
| 3 | [Claude](https://openaitools.app/tool/claude-2) | 1,253,439,413 | +23.8% | Freemium | Delivers superior long-form coding artifacts and nuanced writing, but lacks DeepSeek's specialized open-weight reasoning models. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/claude-2.md) |
| 4 | [Grok](https://openaitools.app/tool/grok) | 203,846,050 | -0.8% | Freemium | Features real-time X social data integration, but is less cost-effective for dedicated developer coding workflows. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/grok.md) |
| 5 | [Perplexity](https://openaitools.app/tool/perplexity-ai) | 88,310,223 | -3.7% | Freemium | Real-time AI answer engine and research workspace combining live web citations with frontier reasoning models. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/perplexity-ai.md) |
| 6 | [Qwen 4 (Alibaba Qwen4)](https://openaitools.app/tool/qwen-4) | 35,101,353 | -6.2% | Freemium | Provides comparable open-weight foundation models and multilingual performance, but requires self-hosting or third-party inference setup. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/qwen-4.md) |
| 7 | [Cursor](https://openaitools.app/tool/cursor) | 23,297,751 | +8.4% | Freemium | The AI coding agent for building ambitious software | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/cursor.md) |
| 8 | [OpenRouter](https://openaitools.app/tool/openrouter-ai) | 19,941,437 | -6.2% | Paid | One API key for hundreds of AI models from every major provider | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/openrouter-ai.md) |
| 9 | [Kimi AI](https://openaitools.app/tool/kimi-chat) | 19,632,261 | -23.4% | Free | Excels at ultra-long document analysis and research, but lacks the same level of open-weight developer community support. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/kimi-chat.md) |
| 10 | [Ollama](https://openaitools.app/tool/ollama) | 9,421,973 | +4.3% | Free, Freemium, Paid | Enables running open-source models locally on consumer hardware, but lacks DeepSeek's cloud-scale hosted reasoning power. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/ollama.md) |

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Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/api2d-com-vs-deepseek

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