DeepSeek Launches Search and Fetch APIs for Developers at $0.75 per 1,000 Requests

New Search APIs

DeepSeek announced two new APIs called Search and Fetch that give developers direct access to its internally built search engine. The Search endpoint returns ranked web results with titles URLs snippets and summaries. The Fetch endpoint retrieves the full content of individual webpages in Markdown format. Both APIs cost seventy five cents per one thousand successful requests and can be used without calling a DeepSeek model.

Background and Infrastructure

For the past two years DeepSeek relied on external providers such as Bocha and Microsoft Bing for web search. In January 2026 Bloomberg reported that the company was hiring engineers to build a multilingual AI search engine covering text images and audio. By October the company says its engine handles hundreds of millions of requests per day and indexes hundreds of billions of webpages. The engine supports multilingual queries and includes filters for spam low quality AI generated material and ranking manipulation.

Market Context and Pricing

The AI search market is growing with several companies operating independent indexes. Brave maintains an index of more than forty billion pages. Exa Perplexity and Parallel have built their own crawling and ranking systems. Cloudflare recently launched a Web Search API that aggregates multiple providers. DeepSeek positions its price at seventy five cents per thousand successful searches which is lower than Parallel and Perplexity at one dollar per thousand and far below Exa at four dollars and Brave at five dollars. Ceramic offers a cheaper keyword based service at twenty five cents per thousand.

Developer Feedback and Limits

Developers on Reddit and Hacker News discussed the pricing and the practical impact of the new APIs. Some praised the low cost while others noted that existing integrations with third party tools may already meet their needs. Business users raised concerns about latency guarantees data processing assurances and the risk of exposing sensitive information through search queries. DeepSeek's privacy policy states that it collects, processes and stores personal data in China and generally keeps user inputs for as long as an account remains open. The Search and Fetch documentation does not specify how long individual queries are kept. The APIs are limited to five requests per second per account and each search can return up to fifty results without extra charge. Only successful requests are billed. A temporary waiver applies to server side tool calls made through DeepSeek Harness Claude Code and Codex until October thirty first after which standard pricing takes effect.

Sources: The New Stack