DeepSeek Will Charge for Search and Fetch Calls Starting Oct. 31

DeepSeek API users will begin paying for successful Search and Fetch requests made through three coding tools on Oct. 31, ending free access to those server-side calls.

Billing starts at noon ET (16:00 UTC). The fee applies when users call the endpoints through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex using DeepSeek API.

Search and Fetch will each cost 5 yuan per 1,000 successful requests. Charges are based on the number of requests, not tokens or the number of results returned. Failed requests, searches with no results and timeouts will not be charged.

Search returns structured web results from DeepSeek’s own search engine. Fetch retrieves one webpage and returns its contents in Markdown. Each endpoint has a separate per-account limit of five requests per second. DeepSeek previously opened Search and Fetch API access to developers.