How to Connect DeepSeek to OpenClaw?

DeepSeek offers arguably the best price-to-quality ratio in the AI model market. DeepSeek V3 delivers quality comparable to GPT-4o at a fraction of the cost — $0.27/1M input tokens and $1.10/1M output tokens.

Sign up at platform.deepseek.com and generate an API key. Add some credits ($5 minimum). Then configure OpenClaw to use DeepSeek.

DeepSeek V3 is the general-purpose model for most tasks. DeepSeek R1 is the reasoning model — slower but excellent for complex analysis, math, and multi-step problems.

Typical monthly cost: $1-5 for moderate daily usage. Even heavy users rarely exceed $10/month. This makes DeepSeek the top recommendation for budget-conscious users.

DeepSeek supports the OpenAI-compatible API format, so integration with OpenClaw is seamless. Function calling works well for MCP skills. The context window is 64K tokens — smaller than Claude or Gemini but sufficient for most conversations.

Performance note: DeepSeek's servers can have variable latency. Response times range from 1-5 seconds for short queries to 10-20 seconds for long outputs. If speed is critical, consider Claude or GPT as the primary model with DeepSeek as a fallback via OpenRouter.

openclaw config set provider deepseek
openclaw config set model deepseek-chat
openclaw config set apiKey your-deepseek-key