Article 300: DeepSeek Sells Web Search at $0.75 per 1,000 Requests and Throws In Free Tool Calls Until November

DeepSeek has launched two raw JSON APIs on its standard bearer-authenticated platform: Search, which returns structured results from an in-house engine, and Fetch, which converts a single page to Markdown. Both bill per successful request at $0.75 per 1,000, with failed requests, empty results and timeouts free of charge. Queries are capped at 128 characters and 50 results per call, each API is limited to 5 QPS per account, and the query language supports site:, lang: and date operators. Server-side tool calls routed through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex are free until 1 November 2026.

Key Takeaway: The pricing is not the interesting decision; the free window is. Charging per successful request rather than per token makes the cost of a retrieval legible in advance, which is precisely what teams building RAG pipelines and browsing agents cannot currently do - the alternative is paying for a search subscription, a proxy pool and the engineering time to keep a crawler alive against blocklists. But free tool calls through third-party agent clients are a distribution play, not a subsidy: whoever wins the traffic before 1 November sets the bill after it. Add the jurisdiction and the pattern sharpens - the same quarter that brings EU enforcement action against two American labs brings a Chinese provider selling the web layer to every agent that can authenticate. For anyone about to renew a crawling contract, $0.75 per thousand successful fetches is a number to price against before the free tier closes.

Sources: DeepSeek API documentation, Hacker News discussion, 18 October 2026