DeepSeek Search + Fetch APIs flip to paid — $0.75 per 1,000 calls
The free window for agent web retrieval closed at 16:00 UTC Oct 31 — still the cheapest index by 6.7x, and your Claude Code and Codex runs now meter too.
Copy markdown
The free ride ended at 16:00 UTC
DeepSeek's Search and Fetch APIs — live since Oct 17 alongside V4.1-Flash — started billing at 00:00 Beijing on Nov 1 (16:00 UTC Oct 31). It's $0.75 per 1,000 successful calls on each endpoint; failed requests, empty results, and timeouts aren't billed.
Still 6.7x cheaper than the next index
At $0.75 per 1,000 requests, DeepSeek undercuts Brave Search ($5), Tavily ($5–8), Perplexity Sonar ($5+), and Exa ($7 standard, $12 deep) — 6.7x below the next-cheapest and 9.3x under Exa. Grounding an agent in live web results just got an order of magnitude cheaper.
Your Claude Code and Codex runs bill now too
The free window specifically covered server-side search and fetch calls made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code, and Codex — those now meter against your DeepSeek key. Rate limit is 5 requests/sec per endpoint per account, with global pricing and no regional tiers.
What you get per call
Search returns 1–50 structured JSON results, each with a short snippet, a 600–800 character LLM-ready summary, and an authority rating; Fetch turns any URL into clean Markdown. Same api.deepseek.com base URL and Bearer auth as the model API, so existing keys drop straight in.