AI Provider Setup · BYOK
Cheapest reasoning per token — strong chain-of-thought at a fraction of Claude's price.
DeepSeek's reasoning models deliver solid multi-step thinking at roughly 5–10x lower cost than comparable Claude or GPT tiers. Good fit for bulk analytical workloads where you'd otherwise burn through budget. The trade-off: slower time-to-first-token than the US-hosted frontier labs.
DEEPSEEK_API_KEYGo to platform.deepseek.com and sign up. International sign-up works with email — you don't need a Chinese phone number.
DeepSeek is prepaid. Open Billing in the left sidebar and top up. $5 goes a long way given the price per token.
Navigate to platform.deepseek.com/api_keys. You'll see an empty list until you create one.
Click Create API Key, name it Admaxxer, and create. The key starts with sk- and is shown only once — copy it immediately.
Go to Settings then AI Providers, find the DeepSeek row, paste the key, and click Connect.
deepseek-reasoner has the full chain-of-thought. deepseek-chat is faster for conversational turns without explicit reasoning traces.
Confirm the key starts with sk-, credits are loaded, and the key hasn't been revoked. DeepSeek's status page is at status.deepseek.com.
Once you've pasted your key into /settings/ai-providers, hit Test. Admaxxer makes a single no-cost call against the provider's /v1/models (or equivalent) endpoint and reports back:
These are the pinned model IDs Admaxxer tests against. The model picker in chat will show these plus any live-catalog entries the provider returns.
| Model ID | Display name | Context | Tools | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
deepseek-reasoner |
DeepSeek Reasoner (recommended) | 128K | Yes | Full chain-of-thought reasoning at the lowest price on the market. |
deepseek-chat |
DeepSeek Chat | 128K | Yes | Faster, cheaper, no explicit CoT. Good for routing and short answers. |
deepseek-coder |
DeepSeek Coder | 128K | Yes | Code-specialized variant. Use when the chat task is mostly code-generation or code-review. |
When it happens: On Connect if the key is invalid or revoked.
Fix: Regenerate at platform.deepseek.com/api_keys and paste the new key.
When it happens: If your DeepSeek balance hits zero.
Fix: Top up at platform.deepseek.com/billing. DeepSeek does not auto-recharge.
When it happens: Under very heavy concurrent load.
Fix: DeepSeek's default rate limit is generous. If you hit it, space out parallel requests.
When it happens: If DeepSeek's region is under pressure — latency can spike.
Fix: Retry with exponential backoff. For critical paths, use OpenRouter to fail over.