"Grok Bot is too expensive for me": how a DeepSeek plugin got 5,700 stars in 30 days

A Zhihu contributor built a "DeepSeek version of Grok Bot" as a plugin in the DeepSeek Harness marketplace. QbitAI wrote it up as "DeepSeek Bot is here" the day after launch, and it gained 641 stars in one day. Two weeks later, turning the plugin into a double-click desktop app caught a second wave. What's worth studying is the playbook, not the position: the spot is already taken, and the platform itself is heading there.

One article, 641 stars in a day

On Oct 11 2026, at 11 a.m., QbitAI published a short piece titled "DeepSeek Bot is here! Community version, install the plugin in DSH and you're set." The opening line: "DeepSeek's official Muse hasn't arrived yet, but the community experts can't wait." A line in the middle is blunter: "Grok Bot is too expensive for me, so what does ds bot taste like?"

稿子里说「上线不到一天……已经给这个项目点了250+星」。那天结束时,这个仓库一天涨了 641 星(trendshift 逐日记录),第二天又涨了 528。新浪财经、凤凰、搜狐、腾讯新闻当天转载;Pandaily 发了英文稿,开源中国和知乎专栏 10-12 跟进。X 上的中文 AI 博主接着转:@NFT_Chen 10-12 写「不到一天冲上 250+ 星,现在已近千星……直接对标 Grok Bot」。

The repo was then called FeiZhuLulu/DeepSeek-Bot. It was created on Oct 7, and v0.1.0 was released on Oct 10. By Nov 6 it had been renamed Fei2411/DS-Bot, with about 5,700 stars and 530 forks (GitHub repo page, 11-06), and it gained 1,202 more stars in the last 7 days.

What it is

DeepSeek Harness (DSH) is an agent runtime framework that DeepSeek open-sourced in August. It has over 270k stars, and an official desktop version came out at the end of September, with a sidebar for one-click plugin installs. DS Bot is one of those plugins: it lets you run a team of "always-on" bots inside DSH.

• Each bot has its own name, role, avatar, and underlying model, plus long-term memory (stored as local Markdown files; after each conversation it automatically reviews what to remember and what to delete).
• There is a "supervisor" bot (Chief): you tell it one sentence, and it creates bots for you and sets up group chats.
• There are group chats, and by default only the supervisor replies in the group, calling other bots as needed. QbitAI wrote about this specifically, because in a "group chat environment that burns tokens fast," users in China care a lot about cost.
• All data stays on your own computer under the Apache-2.0 open-source license, free of charge; users pay model fees directly to DeepSeek.

In one line: the Grok Bot setup, local and free, running on cheap DeepSeek models.

Why this one, and why October

Big companies had already trained people on the format. xAI launched Grok Bot in Aug 11 and Team Bots in September; Meta's Muse arrived in Sep 8 and Claude Duet in Oct 21. "A team of AI bots doing work for you" was the hottest product format from 8 through October, but Grok Bot requires a subscription and is hard to access in China.

DeepSeek itself hadn't built it. The opening line of the QbitAI piece, "the official one hasn't come yet," is the hook of the whole article. DS Bot claimed the "DeepSeek version of Grok Bot" name in that gap.

The name rode on a big brand. "DeepSeek Bot" let media headlines barely change. The cost came later: in Oct 25 the author posted on X that the project was renamed DS-Bot and asked people to stop calling it DeepSeek Bot, and the v0.2.7 installer was renamed from DeepSeek-Bot to DS-Bot. The author didn't say whether the rename was for trademark reasons (likely, but unconfirmed).

Platform distribution was ready-made. Type ds-bot into the DSH desktop app and it installs. The ds-bot npm package had about 36k downloads in the last 30 days, and about 3,000 per day in early November (npm download stats, 11-06, including updates and repeat downloads).

The clearest comparison is BotHarness/DeepSeekBot, which launched 3 weeks earlier and also called itself an "open-source GrokBot alternative." Its features are similar, and it has 676 stars to date. The gap is about 9x, and it comes down to three things: whether media broke the story, how fast it shipped releases, and how hard it was to install. The differentiation is real, but it isn't why this one took off.

Second wave: from plugin to double-click install

After the first wave, daily star gains fell back to a hundred or two. The author didn't stop: in 32 days he merged 388 PRs and shipped 17 releases, and almost all of the 1,368 commits were his (with 3 external contributors).

The turning point was v0.2.0 in Oct 21: Windows and macOS desktop apps that bundle DSH, with no Node install and no admin rights, and DeepSeek accounts can be registered and logged into instantly with a phone number. The first line of the README is now a download button: "Download Windows 10/11 (64-bit), about 212 MB," followed by a long section explaining which buttons to click when Windows shows "Windows protected your PC." The installer isn't code-signed yet, and the author spells this out instead of hiding it. In Oct 23 Linux support was added, along with WinGet and Docker.

Daily stars rose by 413 and 294 on Oct 23 and 24 (trendshift), and it reached #6 on trendshift's JavaScript chart. I found no media article or major repost for this wave; the only things that line up are the desktop app release and the chart placement (likely the lower install barrier at work). In Nov 3 v0.2.7 shipped and the dsbot.app site went live. On Nov 4 the Zhihu overseas account @ZhihuFrontier published a long English post on its context management, and in the following days it went back to gaining more than 200 stars a day.

Its GitHub Release assets have been downloaded about 54k times in total, including 4,705 downloads of the v0.2.7 Windows installer. Auto-updates are included in that count, and from the outside there's no way to tell how many people actually installed it or stuck with it.

Some of the growth came from others too: in Oct 11 someone open-sourced a mobile client for DS Bot (QingJ01/DS-Bot-App, 189 stars), and on Oct 14 NetEase published "DeepSeek Bot mobile client open-sourced," another round of exposure.

Who's following, and who could eat its lunch

A cluster of copycats has already appeared: omdsh-dev/dsh-bot, tyxt-zvid/deepseek-bot-army, qingfengyu153781-star/dsh-bot, 8kugames/dsh-team-bots, and lisongjianustc/dsh-bot, created in Nov 6 ("MiniMax-Bot-style"). All have single-digit stars. Projects in the same ecosystem with a similar direction but a different focus:

The real threat is above: in Oct 31 the official DSH team open-sourced a Super-agent prototype, and it hit twenty thousand stars in under a week. It currently only does a coding agent for a single repo, and it explicitly says it is "not an official product." But on DSH discussion #10674 someone has already proposed making always-on bot teams a first-class capability, noting that ds-bot proved it's feasible. If the official version ever builds it in, this plugin's position gets thin.

If it were you

Verdict: C. Don't chase this specific position. "DeepSeek version of Grok Bot" is already taken by it, with 5,700 stars and a round of media coverage behind it; the later copycats all have single-digit stars, and the platform is moving that way too. What's worth taking is the playbook, applied to the next platform where the space is still open.

Who it suits: people who can ship a usable version of a big company's new product format within a week or two; ideally with some existing visibility in the Chinese AI community (Zhihu, X, WeChat Official Accounts), and knowing how to get outlets like QbitAI or Synced to write about it the same day.

Who it's not for: anyone who wants to build another "Bot team" plugin inside the DSH ecosystem. You'd be number N with no news hook. Anything that only ships features and no distribution, like the DS Bot rival that came 3 weeks earlier, is the example. 676 stars.

How to do it: watch a big open-source platform with a plugin marketplace, hundreds of thousands of stars, and a slow-moving official team. When a big-company hit product shows a new form and the platform hasn't responded, build a "Y version of X" as a plugin within a week. Make the first sentence of the README say exactly that. Borrow the plugin marketplace for distribution, and within two weeks turn it into a double-click standalone installer. Pick one pain point local users care about and put it in the description (DS Bot's was "in group chats only the lead replies by default, saves tokens"). If you insist on doing it against DS Bot, the only open space is what it hasn't done well yet: mobile, IM integration, signed installers. Build those as companion projects, ride its traffic, but the ceiling is probably a few hundred stars (the mobile one is 189).

How to get users: on launch day, send a screenshot that's clear at a glance, plus a line in the style of "I can't afford X, here's the Y version," to Chinese AI media and Chinese AI accounts on X. After that, give every release a new thing to write about (installer, mobile app, website, a long post on one technical detail), and post on X and Zhihu each time you ship. You can ride a big brand name for launch traffic, but have a rename ready for two weeks later.

Deadline: for the DS Bot slot, the window has already closed. For this playbook, the window is one to three weeks after a big company launches a new form. That's when the platform hasn't responded yet and media most want to write about the "grassroots version."

How you'd be wrong: (1) DSH's official team keeps not shipping a built-in persistent Bot team, and a follower to DS Bot gets over a thousand stars within a month. That would show the ecosystem isn't saturated. (2) The reverse: after the official prototype keeps moving, DS Bot still gains a steady one to two hundred stars a day. That would show a "persistent Bot team" has independent demand, and that filling the gaps DS Bot leaves is worth investing in.

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Data and sources: GitHub repo page and Releases (11-06); trendshift daily star gains and rankings; npm download stats (last 30 days, 11-06); QbitAI's "DeepSeek Bot is here! Grassroots version, install it as a plugin in DSH" (10-11, reprinted by Sina Finance); OSChina, Zhihu column, Pandaily, NetEase (10-11 to 10-14); X accounts @NFT_Chen (10-12), the author's rename note (10-25), @ZhihuFrontier (11-04); DSH discussion board #10674; xAI Grok Bot launch page (8-11). Download counts include auto-updates and repeat downloads and are not install counts. The reason for the rename is an inference.