DeepSeek Launches Web Search and Fetch APIs for AI Agents at $0.75 per 1,000 Calls

DeepSeek opened its Search and Fetch APIs to all developers on October 17, pricing each endpoint at $0.75 per 1k successful requests and setting 16:00 UTC on October 31, 2026 as the cutoff when server-side tool calls from Claude Code, Codex, and DeepSeek Harness stop being free. The announcement was posted alongside the launch of DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, with DeepSeek stating that its in-house search engine serves hundreds of millions of requests daily worldwide. Each endpoint is independently capped at 5 queries per second per account, or 432k calls per day at sustained maximum, while failed requests, timeouts, and empty search results are not billed. The Search API returns between 1 and 50 results per call at the same flat per-request rate, including a 0 to 4 site authority tier, a 100 to 200 character UI snippet, and a 600 to 800 character summary designed for language models to read without fetching the underlying webpage. The APIs also accept optional user IP addresses for localization and original user questions without documenting data retention rules, while the Fetch documentation omits the crawler's user agent string, IP ranges, and whether it checks robots.txt. "The Search API and the Fetch API give agents and RAG applications access to live web content." — DeepSeek API Documentation