DeepSeek is currently free but is there any guarantee that it' future versions will be free also? In start such things are free but once we get used to them they start charging for there versions with advance features.
It's vital for super powers to maintain there supremacy in tech field and that's exactly what's going on in AI i.e. Deepseek vs ChatGPT. What China has done is just the beginning of new war in AI domain since other tech companies won't remain silent and will try there best to launch something better then DeepSeek. For the moment, China has shocked the world by launching a cheap AI Chatbot and has caused US tech companies massive financial loss.
To be honest, they just started it, China didn't had any proper AI before this, and they are already quite far behind as well. That doesn't mean that they are going to end up being worse, they will get better and improve eventually, but when you have something worse, and the other one keeps innovating and improving, it would be hard to be equals.
This comes to fee as well, right now it's free, because it's worse, and if it stays worse than it will continue to be free, after all why pay for something worse when you can pay for something better? The idea should always be "this is worse but free, the other one is better but expensive" and in that case we could always end up with chatgpt having a competition. The moment deepseek starts to charge a fee, they will lose all consumers outside of china.