Physix FrontierPhysix Frontier · News Briefing Card (IT Home · Oct 17, 2026)
DeepSeek launches Search and Fetch APIs at 5 yuan per 1,000 calls
KEY FACTS
- DeepSeek has officially launched two APIs, Search and Fetch, both built on its in-house search engine.
- Search returns structured results per query, while Fetch retrieves a single page and returns the body text in Markdown.
- Both endpoints bill per successful request at 5 yuan per 1,000 calls; failures, empty results, and timeouts are not billed.
- Each account is limited to 5 Search and 5 Fetch calls per second, with requests beyond that returning HTTP 429.
- Searches triggered through Claude Code or Codex are free of Search charges until November 1.
KEY DATA
5 yuan per 1,000 callsAPI price
5 per secondSearch rate limit
5 per secondFetch rate limit
128 charactersquery limit
PHYSIX OBSERVATION
The in-house search API sells real-time web capability directly to Agent developers, and billing only on success lowers the cost of trial and error, but the 5-calls-per-second rate limit shows it is still managing load. For RAG applications, this fills in the retrieval link missing from the DeepSeek ecosystem, and adds one more variable to competition over the search entry point.
Source: IT Home report