DSH Desktop
A community-built desktop app for DeepSeek Harness, with the plugin market and mobile remote control built in. Free, MIT, and not an official DeepSeek project.
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Sep 2026
DSH Desktop turns DeepSeek Harness into a normal app. The harness is DeepSeek's open source agent runtime, and running it means Node, pnpm, a terminal, and a port. This is one installer for Windows x64 or any Mac, Intel or Apple Silicon, and the Web UI, host service, and plugin system open in a native window. MIT, free, and not an official DeepSeek project.
Nothing to host. The installer bundles Electron, Node, pnpm, and a pinned harness build, and leaves your global PATH alone. Updates download only after you confirm. Upstream runs unmodified, so official plugins install from the bundled terminal. Newer builds add a built-in community plugin market and mobile remote control.
Solo and small teams on Windows or a Mac should use this instead of the npx command. Medium and large teams get nothing extra: no shared profiles, no policy controls. Anyone already running the harness in a browser gets more from zhu1090093659/dsh-web-ui. For a multi-provider chat client instead, CherryHQ/cherry-studio is further along.
The catch is what it pins. Upstream calls itself a developer preview and warns in capitals that breaking changes are coming, and this ships a fixed release candidate. No Linux installer has shipped yet, the issue tracker carries launch crashes on both supported platforms, and LAN mode opens the UI to your network with no authentication.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFree
Everything. MIT licensed, no accounts, no paid edition. Installers for Windows x64 and universal macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) are published on GitHub Releases, at roughly 150 MB and 320 MB. The maintainers state the project is free and that anyone trying to sell it should be refused.
Paid
There is no paid tier for the app itself. The bill comes from whichever model you point it at. DeepSeek has billed by the clock since August 16, 2026, with off-peak set at half the peak rate. As of September 2026, deepseek-flash (V4.1-Flash) is $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 output off-peak, or $0.30 and $1.20 at peak. V4-Pro is $0.66 in and $1.98 out off-peak, or $1.32 and $3.96 at peak.
Self-Hosted Costs
The app is the self-hosted path, so there is no server bill. Disk is the real line item, since the installer ships Electron, Node, pnpm, and a pinned harness. The harness also accepts Anthropic, OpenAI, Bedrock, Vertex, Azure, and any custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so pointing it at a local vLLM or Ollama server drops token cost to electricity.
When to Pay
Never for the app. Pay for tokens, and schedule long agent runs off-peak now that DeepSeek bills by the clock. deepseek-flash off-peak is the sane default for work that is cheap to verify.
Free forever with no paid edition. The only bill is model tokens, and since DeepSeek went peak and off-peak on August 16, 2026, when you run changes what you pay.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free, and it beats running npx and babysitting a local port
- Small team
- free; everyone installs their own copy, since profiles are per machine
- Medium team
- free, but expect no shared config, no policy controls, no seat management
- Large team
- free, though nothing here helps you govern model access or token spend
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