DeepSeek prices web search for AI agents at RMB 5 per 1,000 calls

DeepSeek wants a cut of the search spend that AI agents generate, and it is pricing to make adoption easy: RMB 5 per 1,000 successful requests, with nothing charged when a call fails. The company has opened its in-house Search and Fetch APIs to all developers building agents.

According to TechNode, the two services split the job. Search returns structured web results from DeepSeek's proprietary search engine. Fetch takes a webpage and extracts its title and content as Markdown. Each is billed at the same RMB 5 rate per 1,000 successful requests.

The billing terms favour the buyer. Failed requests, empty search results and timeouts are not charged, so developers pay only for calls that return something. Access runs through existing DeepSeek API credentials, which means current customers need no new account or key.

One group of calls is free for now. Server-side calls made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex are currently unbilled. TechNode quotes the timeline: "Charging for those calls will begin at midnight Beijing time on November 1."

The launch follows the V4.1-Flash-1017 model update that DeepSeek published on 17 October. TechNode's details come from DeepSeek's API documentation, which is in Chinese.

The pricing is a land-grab. A flat rate, no charge for failures and no new credentials lower the cost of trying the service to almost nothing for anyone already on DeepSeek's API. Bundling search with the model also keeps agent builders from sourcing web access elsewhere.

The free window for server-side calls through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex is the number to watch. Developers running agents through those tools get a free trial until 1 November, then a bill. The notes do not say how heavy that traffic is, so the revenue at stake is unknown. What the window does show is that DeepSeek expects those tools to send it search volume, and that it intends to charge for it once they do.