Everyone keeps saying "DeepSeek is so cheap," but most tutorials jump straight into the advanced stuff. So here's the version I wish I'd had on day one — from zero to your first working API call, no prior experience needed.
Two reasons DeepSeek is a great first API to learn on:
It's cheap. Like, an order of magnitude cheaper than the big US models. You can experiment all day without watching a meter.
It's OpenAI-compatible. If you've ever seen OpenAI's Python code, you already know how to use this — you change two lines. So the skill transfers everywhere.
Let's get you a working call.
