Pandaily reported on 17 October that DeepSeek added two web tools to its API, citing its Chinese documentation. Search queries the web and returns structured results. Fetch takes one page address and returns Markdown, a plain text format. Each costs 5 yuan per 1,000 successful requests; failed calls, empty searches and timeouts are free.
A short snippet of about 100 to 200 characters is for display, while a longer summary of about 600 to 800 characters is for the model to read. Each result also gets a rerank score (0 to 3) and an authority rating (0 to 4). Each tool is capped at 5 queries per second per account; Fetch adds per-domain limits, and going over returns HTTP 429. DeepSeek says Search fees will be waived for searches triggered through Claude Code's Web Search tool or Codex's web_search feature for the first two weeks after the Search API launch; Fetch is not mentioned in the waiver. The billing start date is not yet announced.
Pricing per successful call makes spend easy to forecast, but it moves the risk to the speed cap and to blocked pages, which return errors. Arithmetic from the stated figures: 1 million successful calls cost 5,000 yuan, and one account at 5 queries per second can send at most 432,000 requests a day per tool.