DeepSeek plugin marketplace with grants

DeepSeek is trying to turn Harness from a popular agent app into a platform that third parties build businesses on. When 1.54M daily active users are already using an agent shell tied to DeepSeek servers, and the community has made roughly 35,000 plugins while driving about 92T tokens a day, an official marketplace gives DeepSeek a way to organize discovery, steer quality, and make outside developers increase usage on its own infrastructure.1 2

• Plugins matter because Harness is not just a chat box. It is a working environment where agents keep acting across files, code, and tools. A marketplace turns that sprawl into shelves, rankings, and trusted installs, which makes the product easier to use and gives the best plugin makers a reason to keep building.1
• The token grants are a concrete subsidy for compute hungry extensions. If a developer builds a plugin that triggers long running research, coding, or workflow chains, DeepSeek can offset the cost with tokens instead of cash. That helps seed supply in the same way cloud credits helped early app ecosystems get going.1
• This also mirrors a broader shift across AI. OpenAI and Anthropic have become enormous businesses by owning both models and the user surface, while DeepSeek has already reached a $1B annualized revenue run rate and is looking for stronger product level lock in. A plugin ecosystem is one of the few ways an open model company can build switching costs above raw model pricing.2 3 4

The next step is for the marketplace to decide whether Harness becomes an app store for agent work or just a loose collection of hacks. If DeepSeek can turn top plugins into repeat destinations, then every new developer becomes part of its distribution and monetization engine, and the business moves closer to a durable software platform instead of a model that competes mainly on price.1 2