Two interfaces opened by DeepSeek's self-developed search engine: Search returns structured search results per query, while Fetch converts a single webpage into Markdown; calls initiated via DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code, and Codex server-side tools are currently free for API users, with billing for successful requests starting at 2026-10-31 16:00 UTC (Beijing time 11 1 0:00).
Confidence: High (80) · Event time 2026-10-17
Reasoning
- 10-17 launched (recent development, not within the past 24 hours, 10-27 to 10-30 already collected); listed again this period solely as a billing reminder: calculated based on Beijing time 10-31 morning, less than a day remains until billing starts, and it will not be repeated thereafter.
- Official pricing: 0.75 USD per 1,000 successful requests per endpoint, sharing the same Key as the model API; the news page, Models & Pricing page, and Search & Fetch guide are consistent in their statements.
- The guide specifies that billing only occurs when HTTP 200 is returned with results: empty Search result arrays, Fetch failures to retrieve body content, failures, and timeouts are not charged; the count parameter only determines the number of items returned and does not affect the unit price. Account-level rate limits are Search 100 QPS and Fetch 25 QPS, with the two not sharing quota.
Usage
- POST https://api.deepseek.com/v1/tools/search，请求体如 {"query": "…", "count": 5, "need_content": true}; POST https://api.deepseek.com/v1/tools/fetch，请求体 {"url": "…"}; include Authorization: Bearer <API Key> in the request headers.
- If you frequently perform online searches within Harness / Claude Code / Codex, check your call volume before tonight; if the balance is insufficient, the interface returns HTTP 402, and you must top up first.
Risks
- The official statement claims the index covers hundreds of billions of web pages and filters out SEO spam and low-quality AIGC, but no verifiable retrieval quality benchmarks are provided.
- Fetch is subject to the availability and access policies of target websites, so not all content may be retrievable; billing details are subject to the api-docs pricing page, and the official party reserves the right to adjust prices.
Open · DeepSeek API Docs · News 2026/10/17 · DeepSeek API Docs · Models & Pricing · DeepSeek API Docs · Search & Fetch Guide