DeepSeek's Harness Agent Platform Reaches 1.54 Million Daily Users, Plans Plugin Marketplace

The company counts only people who use Harness through its official API, so the real number of users may be higher. Along with the user figure, DeepSeek said Harness now handles about 92 trillion tokens a day, that third-party developers have written about 35,000 plugins for it, and that about 60% of active users have built or installed at least one of them.

The numbers matter because they show DeepSeek competing beyond its open-weight models. It is now going after the software layer where AI agents plan and carry out tasks, which is the market that Anthropic and OpenAI are building up with their own agent products. Harness launched in public beta in August, and Chinese tech outlet IT Home said it was positioned against Anthropic's Claude Cowork.

Harness is DeepSeek's agent runtime, the software that sits between the underlying model and the user. It is built on what the company calls an "everything is a plugin" design. The platform supplies a stable core, and developers can replace almost everything else, including built-in functions, with third-party plugins.

Version 0.1 came out on August 13, and a desktop version followed on September 29. DeepSeek published a chart of weekly average daily users that shows how fast usage has grown since then. The average was about 271,000 in the week starting September 30, 429,000 the next week and 665,000 the week after that. It then reached 1.13 million in the week starting October 21 and 1.40 million in the week starting October 28. The biggest jump came in late October, a few days after DeepSeek released its V4.1-Flash-1017 model on October 17. The company did not say what caused the rise. FourWeekMBA, which tracked the update, put monthly active users at 5.48 million.

Some reports describe the growth as 468%. That figure compares a single day's count with a seven-day average from late September. DeepSeek's own chart shows a 545% increase measured from the desktop release.

The company plans to build an official plugin marketplace to make plugins easier to publish and find. It also wants to make its plugin interfaces more stable and compatible and to strengthen plugin security. It is preparing a support programme for plugin authors, and its first ideas include token incentives, technical exchanges and promotion of developers' work. DeepSeek gave no launch date for either the marketplace or the programme, and no fees, revenue-sharing terms or revenue figures. It also invited start-ups and companies to offer their products and services inside Harness as plugins.

User reports collected by InfoQ, and republished by 36Kr, show the platform is still rough in places. A Windows user said that after upgrading from version 0.2.1-rc.5 to 0.2.2-rc.1, the number of plugin entries fell from 34 to 2 and the app would not start at first. The user said recovery took about five hours, because there was no backup or rollback. Another user said a task took 30 to 40 minutes on Harness and used more than 20 times as many tokens as the same task on the open-source OpenCode tool. A developer running more than 15 plugins reported infinite loops and context overflows.

DeepSeek has kept releasing updates every few days. The version 0.2.2 builds released between late October and November 4 added rollback when a hot update fails, diagnostics for failed plugin installations and better reuse of the context cache.

Whoever controls the most popular extension system could have an edge in getting developers to choose one agent runtime over another. The figures DeepSeek has published so far are its own and have not been independently verified. The company has not said when the marketplace will open or what plugin authors will be paid.