(Yicai) Feb. 7 -- DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup whose AI assistant recently ousted ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app on the Apple Store, has temporarily suspended accepting new payments for access to its Application Programming Interface service, which allows developers to integrate the chatbot into their own software, as overwhelming demand has led to a server capacity shortage.

The API top-up button on DeepSeek’s website was grey and unresponsive when checked by Yicai.

"Currently server resources are tight. In order to avoid disruptions to your business, we are no longer allowing users to add more credit to their API accounts. Any existing credit balances can still be used," the Hangzhou-based firm said yesterday.

DeepSeek’s large language model, accessed through its API, is being widely used in a number of fields, from businesses to research institutions. Yizhuang Holdings, for instance, relies on the API to promote the use of the chatbot in biomedicine, automobile manufacturing and other fields.

The DeepSeek API supports multi-language interaction and multi-modal tasks and can be used by a wide range of businesses from international enterprises to academic research. Its low cost, high performance and ecological structure enables the universal use of AI technology from small and medium-sized enterprises to individual developers.

The Deepseek LLM is available at a discount until midnight, Feb. 8. After that, users will be charged CNY2 (USD0.30) per million tokens input and CNY8 per million tokens output. The DeepSeek-reasoner model, which is still in development, will cost CNY4 per million tokens input and CNY16 per million tokens output once launched.

DeepSeek only has accounts on three social media platforms, namely WeChat, Xiaohongshu and X, formerly known as Twitter, it said the same day. The firm’s official website and app do not contain any advertisements or paid-for items, so users need to be mindful of fake charges.

Editor: Kim Taylor