DeepSeek Harness reaches 1.54 million daily users on its API

DeepSeek’s agent framework for office and coding work launched in August, and its users mostly pay for the model calls they make.

By Alexandre S. 9 Nov 2026, 04:30 UTC

DeepSeek’s agent software is growing fast on a pay-as-you-go model. DeepSeek Harness is an open-source framework that lets the company’s AI models carry out longer jobs such as documents, spreadsheets, slides and code. It had 1.54 million daily active users on DeepSeek’s official API (the paid connection developers use to call its models) in the week to 4 November. The Hangzhou company released the figure on Thursday 5 November 2026, Yicai reports. That is up from 429,000 in the week to 7 October and 271,000 in the week to 30 September.

Users consume about 92 trillion tokens a day, the text units AI models bill by. About 35,000 third-party plug-ins have appeared, and about 60% of users have created or installed at least one, Yicai adds.

The figure counts API users, a different measure from the audience of the DeepSeek chat app, 36Kr notes. Harness launched as version 0.1 on 13 August and got a desktop client on 29 September. Its users usually pay the API costs themselves, which makes free use harder than with Tencent’s WorkBuddy or Alibaba’s Qianwen Office, 36Kr adds. WorkBuddy had 32.353 million monthly users in September, by QuestMobile’s count.

Our price sheet, checked 8 November, shows the flat-fee route: Claude Pro costs $20 a month and includes Claude Code. The sheet carries no DeepSeek prices.

Harness grew from 271,000 to 1.54 million daily users in five weeks, and most of those users pay for every model call they make.

DeepSeek Harness reaches 1.54 million daily users on its API

Sources

More AI news from 9 November 2026