A free DeepSeek account is required, and no card is needed. The chat app at chat.deepseek.com showed us a login wall before anything else; there's no logged-out try-it mode. Signing in with a Google account worked, and the app asked our birth month and year once.
The API is the paid lane: it bills by the token, and DeepSeek's pricing page carries the current rate. The downloadable model weights are a technical lane, free under the MIT license. Neither is needed for this guide.
Every step below was tested on a fresh free account on October 19, 2026.