DeepSeek prices its web search and page fetch APIs at $0.75 per 1,000 calls

DeepSeek has opened two raw APIs for agents and RAG apps: Search, which returns ranked web results from its own search engine, and Fetch, which turns a single web page into Markdown. Both cost $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests, and failed calls, empty results and timeouts are not billed. Each account is capped at 5 requests per second on each API. Search and fetch calls made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex on the DeepSeek API stay free until billing starts on 1 November 2026, Beijing time. On Hacker News (537 points, 226 comments), six top-level commenters line up rival prices, such as about $4 per 1,000 searches for Exa, $5 for Brave and $12 for Kagi, and several call DeepSeek's price very competitive. The hands-on reports are less kind: one commenter who ran quick tests on their own fetch benchmark says the quality is not very good, another says fetch returned the text without the links, and a third found that politically sensitive queries return no results. The top question, how it copes with Cloudflare checks and other anti-bot walls, drew 56 replies that mostly say it depends on the site and the service. No consensus on quality; the price is the draw. Sorted take: Cheap enough to try for an agent that needs live web lookups, but test it on your own queries first and keep a fallback provider for anything sensitive or business-critical.