DeepSeek opened Search and Fetch APIs billed per successful request.
DeepSeek opens Search and Fetch APIs for agent retrieval
2026-10-17Verified announcementTRIAL
DeepSeek opened raw Search and Fetch APIs that return structured search results and webpage Markdown. Each costs $0.75 per 1,000 successful non-empty requests and has a separate account-level 5 QPS limit. Server-side tool calls through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex are temporarily free until November 1 Beijing time.
What this means for you
For RAG and agent teams, this separates retrieval cost from model tokens and offers a low-cost fetch path. The authority field is vendor metadata, so relevance, attribution and prompt-injection defenses still need local validation.
Evidence & related material
Technical details & scores
| Endpoints | POST /v1/tools/search and POST /v1/tools/fetch |
|---|---|
| Price | $0.75 per 1,000 successful non-empty calls for each API |
| Limits | separate 5 QPS account limits; Fetch also has per-domain limits |
| Free Window | server-side tools through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex free until 2026-10-31T16:00:00Z |
| Time Basis | official pages are date-only; absent from prior capture and present in current capture |
Technical impact 3
Engineering value 5
Adoption signal 2
Maturity 3
Verification cost 2
Risk 3