DeepSeek is a model provider option for building AI agents. Strong reasoning and coding at a fraction of frontier pricing, with the weights published so you can move off the API later.
Worth knowing. OpenAI-compatible, so it is a base-URL swap. The open weights are the real hedge: if the hosted API is ever unacceptable, the same model runs on vLLM.
DEEPSEEK_API_KEY=
| Option | What it does | Licence | Self-host |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek | Strong reasoning and coding at a fraction of frontier pricing, with the weights published so you can move off the API later. | Proprietary | No |
| Anthropic | Claude Opus, Sonnet and Haiku. Strong tool use and long-horizon agentic work. | Proprietary | No |
| OpenAI | GPT and o-series via the Responses API. | Proprietary | No |
| Google Gemini | Gemini models with very long context and native multimodality. | Proprietary | No |
| Amazon Bedrock | Frontier models inside your AWS account, with IAM and VPC boundaries. | Proprietary | No |
| Google Vertex AI | Claude and Gemini under GCP billing, IAM and regional controls. | Proprietary | No |
| OpenRouter | One API key, several hundred models, automatic failover. | Proprietary | No |
| Hugging Face | One OpenAI-compatible endpoint routed across Groq, Together, Fireworks, Cerebras and Replicate — with the open-weight catalogue behind it. | Proprietary | No |
| Venice AI | Hosted open-weight inference with no prompt logging or retention, plus an anonymising proxy in front of the frontier APIs. | Proprietary | No |
| LiteLLM | Self-hosted proxy that speaks one API to 100+ providers, with keys and budgets. | Open source | Yes |
| Groq | Open-weight models at very low latency. | Proprietary | No |
| Ollama | Open-weight models on your own machine. Nothing leaves the box. | Open source | Yes |
| vLLM | High-throughput open-weight serving on your own GPUs. | Open source | Yes |
Every page here answers to Accept: text/markdown and returns the same content at roughly a tenth the tokens. No separate site, no toggle — same URL.
curl -s -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://newagent.build/c/deepseek