Coding · Head-to-head

DeepSeek vs Bolt.new

DeepSeek (freemium, AI Score 8.7/10) vs Bolt.new (freemium, AI Score 8/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.

The verdict

Pick DeepSeek if…

→overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 8.7 vs 8)
→you want our editor's pick for this category
→your primary use case is developers who own their agent harness and can hold a stable prompt prefix, since the cache rate is what makes deepseek cheap, and whose work is text rather than screenshots or audio.
→you need: agents

Try DeepSeek →

Pick Bolt.new if…

→your primary use case is founders and product engineers who want a full-stack prototype — ui, api routes, postgres and auth — running and deployed in an afternoon without configuring a local environment.
→you need: productivity

Try Bolt.new →

Spec	DeepSeek	Bolt.new
Category	Coding	Coding
Pricing model	freemium	freemium
Headline pricing	Free chat + API from $0.14/M input tokens (V4-Flash beta)	Free tier + token-metered paid plans — check website for current pricing
Free tier	Free web and mobile chat with daily usage limits; API is pay-as-you-go, check the platform console for any current credit offer	Yes — a recurring daily token allowance, enough to build and preview small apps but exhausted quickly on anything iterative
AI Score	8.7/10	8/10
Best for	Developers who own their agent harness and can hold a stable prompt prefix, since the cache rate is what makes DeepSeek cheap, and whose work is text rather than screenshots or audio.	Founders and product engineers who want a full-stack prototype — UI, API routes, Postgres and auth — running and deployed in an afternoon without configuring a local environment.
Editor's pick	✓ Yes	—
Use cases	development agents	development productivity
Date added	2026-05-01	2026-04-30

Coding · freemium

✓V4-Flash lists $0.14/M input and $0.28/M output, roughly 36x and 107x under GPT-5.6 Sol's $5 and $30
✓Cache hits at $0.003/M make a repeated agent prefix nearly free, blending to about $0.06/M on an agent-shaped traffic mix
✓MIT-licensed 284B/13B-active weights on Hugging Face, so the same model can be self-hosted or fine-tuned
✓1M-token context on both V4-Pro and V4-Flash handles whole codebases without chunking
✓Native Responses API plus stated Codex adaptation lets agent harnesses point at it without a chat shim

×Text in, text out — no image, audio or video input, so screenshot-driven debugging is off the table
×V4-Flash is a public beta: no SLA, movable rate limits, and no published throughput figure (Artificial Analysis lists Speed as N/A)
×Verbose output — 210M tokens across nine evaluations against a 100M median, which eats into the cheap-token advantage
×China-hosted inference, and the Responses path parks conversation state on DeepSeek's servers, a compliance question before an engineering one

Coding · freemium

✓Genuinely zero setup — a full Node dev environment, package installs and dev server all run in the browser tab
✓Generates a deployable full-stack app with API routes, Postgres and auth rather than UI-only scaffolding
✓Source code stays editable in place and exports to GitHub, so projects can graduate to a normal workflow
✓One-click Netlify deploy with custom domain support takes prompt to live URL without leaving the tool
✓Open-source codebase means a self-hostable community fork (bolt.diy) exists for teams that need it

×Token-metered billing makes cost unpredictable — retries and failed generations draw down the same allowance as successful ones
×Runtime is bound to the JavaScript/Node ecosystem plus Expo; no Python, Go or JVM backends
×Non-trivial business logic, security review and data modelling still require an experienced developer to finish
×Crowded field in 2026 — Lovable, v0 and Replit Agent overlap heavily, and Bolt's advantage over them has narrowed to the in-browser runtime and code portability

Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.