DeepSeek vs Yi Model

A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.

DeepSeek Hangzhou lab shipping MIT-licensed V4 models and a very cheap API Visit Yi Model 01.AI's open bilingual models, frozen since 2024; the paid API closed... Visit
RECATOOLS Score 8.2 / 10 6.8 / 10
Capability 9 7
Value for money 10 7.5
Ease of use 7 6
ASEAN readiness 5 5
API quality 8 6.5
Pricing Open Source Open Source
Free tier Free chat on the web and in the app; MIT-licensed open weights to self-host Yi-6B, Yi-34B, Yi-1.5 and Yi-Coder weights free under Apache 2.0; the paid Yi API closed on 3 September 2026
Paid from $0.15 per 1M input tokens (deepseek-flash, cache miss, off-peak); $0.30 at peak —
Has API ✓ ✓
Open source ✓ ✓
Free to use ✓ ✓
Users ~130M monthly active users (late 2025) 500k+ downloads
Founded 2023 2023
Maker High-Flyer 01.AI (零一万物)
Verdict

DeepSeek remains the price benchmark for capable models: V4.1-Flash costs $0.15 to $0.30 per million input tokens and V4-Pro under $4 per million output at peak, both with 1M-token context, and the weights are MIT-licens...

Yi is now a finished product line. The open weights, from Yi-6B to Yi-1.5 and Yi-Coder, remain free under Apache 2.0 and are still a usable bilingual Chinese-English base, especially for teams that already deployed them....

Full review → Full review →
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Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.