DeepSeek will start charging for its Search and Fetch API tools on Oct. 31, making successful calls through supported coding assistants subject to a fixed per-request rate.
The charges take effect at 16:00 UTC on Oct. 31 (noon ET). The rate is 5 yuan for every 1,000 successful calls to the relevant endpoint. Search or Fetch calls made through Claude Code, Codex or DeepSeek Harness using the DeepSeek API will incur the fee. The bill depends on call count, not token consumption or result volume.
Search provides an organized list of web results from DeepSeek’s search engine, while Fetch retrieves one page and converts its text into Markdown.
DeepSeek will waive fees for calls that fail or time out and for Search queries that yield no matches. Each endpoint has a distinct account limit of five calls per second.
