On October 17, 2026, alongside the V4.1-Flash-1017 model upgrade, DeepSeek launched two standalone APIs—Search and Fetch—breaking out an in-house search engine that already handles hundreds of millions of requests per day into two JSON endpoints priced at $0.75 per 1,000 successful calls, with failed requests billed nothing.
Two endpoints, clean separation
Search and Fetch share the same DeepSeek API Key via Bearer auth, both rooted at https://api.deepseek.com. Search hits /v1/tools/search, Fetch hits /v1/tools/fetch. Each has its own billing, its own QPS cap, and the two quotas do not interfere.
Search accepts a 1 to 128-character query and returns 10 results by default, capped at 50. Each item ships three layers: a UI-oriented snippet (100 to 200 characters), a model-oriented summary (600 to 800 characters), and full-page content when need_content=true is set. The endpoint also supports a familiar search operator grammar: site:, -site:, lang:, after:, before:, exact phrases, and double-quoted exclusions—anyone who has done SEO work picks it up with zero migration.
Fetch is even simpler: hand it a URL, get back {title, content} where content is already Markdown, not HTML, because models prefer Markdown. The HTTP error semantics here are subtly different from the standard: a 404 does not necessarily mean the page is gone, only that the content could not be extracted; 403 means the security policy blocked the request; 402 means the account is out of credit. Agent wrappers need to handle 4xx codes as retrieval issues, not as content disappearance, or the agent will draw the wrong conclusion.
Pricing, limits, and a free window
$0.75 per 1,000 successful requests, with failed requests, empty results, and timeouts not billed—that line is the takeaway. Search is capped at 100 QPS, Fetch at 25 QPS, and these pools are separate from model concurrency, so agent fan-outs stop clobbering model rate limits.
The free window is even more aggressive. Between October 17 and 16:00 UTC on October 31, any server-side tool call to Search or Fetch made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code, or Codex is not charged. DeepSeek is using this window to push its search pipeline into Claude Code, Codex, Tencent CodeBuddy, and WorkBuddy—other companies' coding agents. After 16:00 UTC on October 31, the list price snaps back to $0.75 per 1,000 calls.
For context, Startup Fortune's launch-day comparison lists Brave around $5 per 1,000 calls, Exa $4 to $7, Perplexity $1 to $5, and Tavily $8 to $16. Even by the lower end of those ranges, DeepSeek is roughly an order of magnitude cheaper. Launch prices are not promises, however—DeepSeek has raised prices on other product lines before, and developers should keep that in mind.
The data question is the real one
There is a trade-off for that $0.75 price. DeepSeek's privacy policy is explicit that personal data is collected, processed, and stored in mainland China, and the platform terms are governed by Chinese law. Whether API inputs feed model improvement is not stated clearly in the API terms; the Search guide says nothing about retention windows or data residency. Italian and German regulators have previously acted against DeepSeek over data transfers to China—if your queries carry customer data, confidential information, or anything not yet public, read the terms before you wire this up.
The technical surface is clean: Bearer auth, OpenAI-compatible error format, JSON in, JSON out. The model-side claims, like a 77.0 DeepSWE v1.1 score beating Anthropic Opus 5 at 74.0, or a 74.2% Pass@1 on DeepSWE v1.1 edging Opus-5's 74.0%, are all vendor-reported numbers on tables that leave out newer competitors—independent testing has not yet caught up.
The signal here is not "DeepSeek upgraded a model again." It is "DeepSeek is building a tool layer." Search, Fetch, Harness, and V4.1-Flash-1017 stitch together into a complete low-cost agent puzzle. The question for anyone building agents is whether their actual workloads fit under the limits, whether their sensitive data should travel through this route at all, and whether this price card will still be in play once the October 31 free window closes.