Accessing your DeepSeek server via API
Quick answer
You can configure API access within OpenWebUI, or set up your own API for external integrations. The main reason to run DeepSeek on a dedicated server instead of its free chat interface is control: over your data, your deployment environment, and the performance you get.
Why dedicated hosting instead of DeepSeek's free chat interface
When you host your own DeepSeek instance, you keep full control over your data and deployment environment. That matters most for use cases that need stringent privacy measures, or performance that isn't affected by other users' load. A dedicated server also gives you consistent performance and resource availability that you're unlikely to get from a shared or free service, since you're not competing with other users for capacity.
Setting up API access
You can configure API access within OpenWebUI itself, or set up your own API for external integrations if you need something more tailored to how your applications call the model. Either way, the access point sits on hardware that's entirely yours, so there's no shared rate limiting or noisy-neighbour effect from other customers.
Query limits
Because the server is entirely yours, you're not sharing capacity with other customers the way you would on a free, shared chat interface.