DeepSeek opened its Search and Fetch APIs to all developers on October 17, 2026, and priced each endpoint at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests. The company announced the launch on X alongside its DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 model update, saying: "Search & Fetch APIs are now open to everyone!"
What DeepSeek released
The two endpoints sit on the same API host and use the same Bearer authentication as DeepSeek's chat completions API. Search is a POST /v1/tools/search request that returns ranked web results as JSON. Fetch is a POST /v1/tools/fetch request that takes one URL and returns the page title and body as Markdown. Both are read-only.
DeepSeek says the search index comes from an in-house engine that serves "hundreds of millions of requests daily worldwide." That figure appeared in the company's X post; the API documentation does not repeat it.
Search accepts a query of 1 to 128 Unicode characters and a count parameter between 1 and 50, with a default of 10. It forwards search operators such as site:, -site:, lang:, after:, before:, and quoted phrases. An optional localization field takes an IP address for localizing results.
What one result contains
Each item in the results array includes the following fields.
Field | What the documentation says |
|---|---|
| Page title |
| Result link |
| A short query-related summary, usually 100 to 200 characters, for display in a user interface |
| A long query-related summary, usually 600 to 800 characters, "intended to be read by a model" |
| Page text; an empty string when |
| Publication time in RFC 3339 UTC, or null when unknown |
| A 0 to 3 score combining relevance, authority, and freshness; 1.5 or above is described as a high-quality result |
| A 0 to 4 authority rating, where -1 means unknown and 3 or above is described as highly authoritative |
| Site label and icon URL, either of which can be null |
The need_content parameter defaults to false. With the default setting, Search returns the summary and the URL but leaves the page body empty. A caller that wants the text has to set need_content to true, and the documentation notes that content may still be empty when it is unavailable.
The documentation describes the field only as a long, query-related summary. It does not say how that summary is produced, whether a model writes it, or whether it quotes the source page.
How billing works
DeepSeek prices Search and Fetch separately, at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests for each endpoint. The Chinese-language documentation lists the same rate as 5 yuan per 1,000 successful requests.
The billing unit is the request, not the token and not the result. Asking for 50 results costs the same as asking for one. A request is billable only when it returns HTTP 200 and produces a result: Search must return a non-empty results array, and Fetch must return page content. Failed requests, empty search results, and timeouts are not billed.
DeepSeek's X post says "$0.75 per 1,000 calls," while the documentation says "1,000 successful requests." The documentation's billing rules are the more specific of the two.
Both endpoints allow 5 requests per second per account. The limits are counted independently, so Search traffic does not consume the Fetch quota. Fetch also applies a per-domain limit. Exceeding either limit returns HTTP 429.
The free window
Server-side Search and Fetch calls made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code, or Codex are currently free for DeepSeek API users. Per-request billing starts at 16:00 UTC on October 31, 2026, which is 00:00 on November 1 in Beijing.
The documentation describes that exemption as applying to server-side tool calls made when the DeepSeek API is used through those three tools. It does not describe a general free tier for direct calls to the endpoints.
How the price compares
List prices from three providers, checked on October 19, 2026:
Provider and product | Price | Billing unit |
|---|---|---|
DeepSeek Search or Fetch | $0.75 per 1,000 | Successful requests |
Brave Search API | $5 per 1,000 | Requests, with $5 in monthly credits and a 50 queries-per-second limit |
Microsoft Grounding with Bing Search | $14 per 1,000 | Grounding transactions, with a limit of 150 per second and 1 million per day |
DeepSeek and Brave sell search queries. Microsoft sells grounding transactions inside its agent platform, and its pricing page includes citation and display requirements for the product.
Brave's page advertises both "$5 in free credits every month" and, in its hero copy, "up to $20 in free calls every month." The two figures are not reconciled on the page.
Fetch limits and errors
A Fetch URL can be up to 8,192 characters and must be an HTTP or HTTPS URL with a host. It cannot contain a username or password. The response contains a title, which can be empty, and the page content as Markdown.
The documentation says fetching depends on the target site's availability and access policies. HTTP 403 means the request was rejected by the security policy. HTTP 404 means no usable page content could be retrieved, which the documentation says can include an unavailable URL, a site-policy block, a target-site error, an unsupported content type, or no extractable Markdown.
What has not been confirmed
The documentation does not explain how the summary field is generated, how the rerank_score and authority values are calculated, or what user agent the Fetch service sends. It says fetching is subject to each site's access policies but does not describe robots.txt handling.
The API response contains no referral, visit, or click data for the pages it returns. The announcement does not describe any effect on traffic to those pages.
DeepSeek has not said whether the $0.75 rate will change after November 1, or whether the free window covers direct endpoint calls that do not pass through Harness, Claude Code, or Codex.
Sources
DeepSeek API documentation. "Search & Fetch." Accessed October 19, 2026. https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/search
DeepSeek API documentation. "Models & Pricing." Accessed October 19, 2026. https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing
DeepSeek's official X account. Post, October 17, 2026. https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/2111375640717033777
Brave. "Search API." Accessed October 19, 2026. https://brave.com/search/api/
Microsoft. "Grounding with Bing Search pricing." Accessed October 19, 2026. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/grounding-pricing
Author: Sophie Renard, AI Search Briefing Analyst Tracking 30+ Platforms at Auspia. Sophie writes timely briefs on platform changes across AI search.
