DeepSeek launches Search and Fetch APIs for agents at $0.75 per 1000 successful requests
- DeepSeek's Search API returns structured results from its in-house search engine, and the Fetch API returns a single web page as Markdown.
- Both APIs are raw JSON endpoints at POST https://api.deepseek.com/v1/tools/search and POST https://api.deepseek.com/v1/tools/fetch, using the same bearer authentication as the DeepSeek API.
- Search returns between 1 and 50 results per request (default 10), and setting need_content to true adds page content to each result.
- Search accepts query operators such as site:, -site:, lang:, after:, and before:, plus an optional IP address for localizing results.
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Honestly the anti-bot question is the whole thing. You can get around most Cloudflare checkbox and Anubis setups with some tricks, but Google Captcha v3 is the hard one and you need your own proxy swarm to make it work at scale.
It depends on the site. Claude and ChatGPT send identifiable user agents, so they're easy to block and they don't try to get around bot protection. Other services use browser user agents, data center or residential IPs, and it's hit or miss from page to page.
Looks like they built their own index and return cached results. If you want the live page you still have to deal with bot detection. Anubis exists to stop AI crawler floods, so if DeepSeek only scrapes every few hours that's probably fine for site owners. My guess is their crawler respects robots.txt, but I don't know.
For comparison, Exa is $4 per 1000, Brave Search API is $5 and Kagi API is $12. SERP API is around $1.50 if you don't mind the quality.
Kagi's $10/mo plan is a TOS violation with an LLM, but the API pricing is fine. Competitor uruky is more relaxed about API use and cheaper.
About a year ago I built my own search and fetch MCP tools on third-party scraping providers. My estimate is that it's about 15 to 20 times cheaper than what OpenAI and Anthropic charge for their built-in web search and fetch. Pretty impressive that DeepSeek undercuts that today.
Why does fetch cost money at all? Most local requests die with Python or curl unless you run a remote-controlled browser, and captchas make mass requests basically unusable. Outsourcing to a stable API is worth it because it gets the LLM closer to current info and code.
Ollama Cloud offers something similar too, but they don't really list pricing. I think it's just rolled into the subscription.
Will DeepSeek pay the creators whose pages get fetched? That's the question I keep coming back to.