DeepSeek API free credits: what you actually get

People search for "DeepSeek API free tier" and get vague answers. Here's the straight version: what free credit actually exists, what it buys, and how to claim it without a card.

Does DeepSeek give free API credits?

Not in a way most people can use. Trial credit on the official platform has come and gone over time, and claiming anything there assumes a Chinese phone number and a Chinese payment method — which is where most developers outside China fall off.

So the practical answer for someone in Nigeria, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Egypt or anywhere else with card trouble is: get the free credit from a gateway instead. Many OpenAI-compatible gateways hand out a small starting balance specifically because they know the first question everyone asks is "can I test this without paying".

What you get here

Create an account at api.lbase.com/register with an email address and you get $2 of credit, automatically, with no card and no Chinese phone number.

That is not a trial that expires in 24 hours. It sits in your balance until you spend it.

What $2 actually buys

This is the part nobody publishes, and it's the only number that matters. Rates are per million tokens:

| Model | Input | Output |

|---|---|---|

| deepseek-flash (V4.1) | $0.55 | $1.65 |

| deepseek-v4-pro | $1.65 | $4.95 |

So $2 of credit is roughly:

• ~3.6M input tokens on deepseek-flash, or ~1.2M output tokens
• in normal chat-shaped traffic (a few hundred tokens in, a few hundred out) that's comfortably 1-2 million tokens of real use
• on the bigger pro model, expect roughly a third of that

For "does this model handle my use case, and is the latency from my location acceptable" — that is a lot of testing. It is not a free production tier, and anyone advertising one is either rate-limiting you into uselessness or counting on you not reading the limits.

How to claim it, in order

1. Register at api.lbase.com/register. The $2 lands automatically — there's no promo code to hunt for.
2. Go to API Keys and create a key. Pick a group when you do. A key with no group returns "API Key is not assigned to any group" on every request, and this is the single most common reason people conclude the API is broken.
3. Point your client at our base URL. Nothing else in your code changes.
4. Watch the balance as you go. When it's gone, top-ups start at $10 by PayPal or USDT.

The honest part

We're a reseller, not DeepSeek. If you can pay DeepSeek directly, it's cheaper per token — the free credit is a way to evaluate, not a permanent discount.

We run one node in Hong Kong, so treat uptime as best-effort and keep a fallback configured for anything production. We don't store prompt contents beyond billing and abuse prevention.

And the $2 is genuinely free: you don't need to add a payment method to claim it, which is the whole point of it existing.