Coding · Head-to-head
DeepSeek vs North Mini Code
DeepSeek (freemium, AI Score 8.7/10) vs North Mini Code (free, AI Score 7.8/10). 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 7.8)
- →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.
Pick North Mini Code if…
- →budget is the constraint
- →your primary use case is teams self-hosting a coding agent on their own gpus who need permissive licensing and low memory footprint more than they need frontier-level scores or a million-token window.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | DeepSeek | North Mini Code |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Coding | Coding |
| Pricing model | freemium | free |
| Headline pricing | Free chat + API from $0.14/M input tokens (V4-Flash beta) | Free open weights (Apache 2.0) — you pay only your own compute |
| 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 | The weights are unconditionally free under Apache 2.0; your only cost is the compute you run them on. Any hosted-endpoint pricing is set by whoever hosts it, not by the license. |
| AI Score | 8.7/10 | 7.8/10 |
| 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. | Teams self-hosting a coding agent on their own GPUs who need permissive licensing and low memory footprint more than they need frontier-level scores or a million-token window. |
| Editor's pick | ✓ Yes | — |
| Use cases | development agents | development agents |
| Date added | 2026-05-01 | 2026-06-15 |
Pros and cons
DeepSeek
Coding · freemium
Pros
- ✓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
Cons
- ×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
North Mini Code
Coding · free
Pros
- ✓Apache 2.0 with no usage restrictions — commercial use, private forks, and immunity from a vendor repricing or retiring the version you run
- ✓~3B active parameters means it fits on a single consumer GPU while answering usefully on multi-step repo tasks, a combination still rare
- ✓Interleaved thinking with native JSON-schema tool calling is purpose-built for agentic loops rather than bolted on afterwards
- ✓Quantized variants plus vLLM/SGLang/Ollama/Docker support make the local-deployment path genuinely short
Cons
- ×256K context is now the short end of the open-weights coding tier — GLM-5.2 and MiniMax M3 both ship 1M-token windows
- ×Near-identical competition: Poolside's Laguna XS.2 is also Apache 2.0, also ~33B/3B MoE, and claims a higher SWE-Bench Verified score from an earlier release
- ×Benchmark figures (67.6% Verified, 40.2% Pro) are Cohere's own launch claims and have not been independently re-verified here
- ×Code specialist only, and MoE serving needs vLLM or SGLang — an addition to your stack rather than a replacement, with no confirmed first-party managed hosting
Related comparisons
Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.