What Does DeepSeek Mean to Ecommerce SaaS?

Recently, I've read many articles about DeepSeek, trying to understand what it is and what it means for the e-Commerce SaaS industry. There is no denying that DeepSeek makes it more affordable for us to use AI and build powerful apps.

Here are my findings about DeepSeek.

Overview of DeepSeek

DeepSeek has had a seismic impact on the global AI industry. It reached 100 million users within just 14 days, and it became the talk of the tech world.

The Chinese startup upends AI competition with "DeepSeek-R1," which matches the capacity of prevailing AI chatbots developed by Silicon Valley giants.

This itself is already amazing as DeepSeek only has a cluster of 10,000 NVIDIA's older-generation A100 chips. In comparison, ChatGPT is powered by 10 times more cutting-edge chips (100,000 H100 GPUs). This means that for just a fraction of the cost, DeepSeek made breakthroughs in reasoning capabilities by squeezing out every drop of power from these AI chips.

As soon as investors realized DeepSeek, tech stocks sank. In particular, NVIDIA's market value dropped by $600bn.

Later, Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, predicted that AI usage costs would drop 10x yearly, and at this rate, by 2035, any individual would have access to as much intelligence as the world today.

The Implications of DeepSeek for SaaS Startups

• The cutting-edge DeepSeek models are open-source, thus, allowing for local setup.
• Lower barriers to entry for startups: No need to invest $100 million to build AI models. The latest studies show that uploading?1 million tokens?into?DeepSeek-R1 costs just $0.55, whereas downloading 1 million tokens costs just $2.19.
• Data privacy & security: Unlike ChatGPT and other AI models that retain user input data to further train themselves, running DeepSeek locally means no data leaves our system.
• Faster implementation: DeepSeek's chain of thought makes prompt engineering less demanding. We need to be proficient at prompts to get great responses. What's more, the open-source model also allows us to optimize and fine-tune the model to meet our business needs.
• Lower latency: Self-hosting DeepSeek means no API rate limits and reduced reliance on network connections.

The Actual Implementation Costs?

According to Matthew Carrigan, an engineer at Hugging Face, it takes around $6,000 to set up complete AI hardware and software for running DeepSeek-R1 locally.

Our AI data team lead is well aware of the value of the local setup — the more we use it, the lower the marginal costs.

Here's our rough estimate: running the distilled DeepSeek-V3 37B model locally costs about $1 per hour (without taking into account API integration, Internet, and performance). We believe that more investment is needed for business use. And I'm open to the opportunities.

We're still doing research. Hopefully, this year, our most popular apps, including ParcelPanel , Loloyal , Trustoo.io , SEOAnt , Willdesk , and Langwill, will come up with some user-friendly AI-powered features.

The Future of AI in Ecommerce: A Game-Changer

AI is about to change the game for e-commerce stores. Picture this: your store runs on autopilot—AI takes care of product selection, smart pricing, marketing, customer support 24/7, and personalized recommendations for each shopper.

With AI handling everything from orders to inventory and logistics, your store operates seamlessly around the clock, with very little hands-on work required. You can sit back, and rest assured.

E-commerce business owners, are you ready to adopt AI-powered SaaS in 2025? What AI features are you most excited about? Let’s talk in the comments!

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