DeepSeek's $0.75 search API undercuts Brave, Exa and Perplexity on list price

DeepSeek is selling web search and page fetching to developers at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests each, billed only when a call returns a result [1][2]. That list price is well below the $4 to $14 per 1,000 that Exa, Brave, Perplexity and Google publish for their own search or grounding calls [4][5][6][7].

What do DeepSeek's Search and Fetch APIs do?

DeepSeek says the two APIs give agents and RAG applications access to live web content [1]. Search takes a query of up to 128 characters and returns 1 to 50 results, each with a title, URL, a short snippet, a 600 to 800 character summary meant for a model and, optionally, the page content [1].

Queries keep their operators, including site:, lang:, after: and before:, so developers can restrict results by domain, language and date [1]. Fetch takes a single URL and returns that page as Markdown, subject to the target site's availability and access policies [1].

DeepSeek says the APIs run on its in-house search engine, which it claims indexes hundreds of billions of web pages and handles hundreds of millions of search requests a day [3].

The AI Pin first reported the launch on 17 October alongside DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash update; this piece looks at the price against rivals.

How does the $0.75 price compare with rival search APIs?

DeepSeek charges $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests for its Search API and the same for its Fetch API. Failed requests, empty search results and timeouts are not billed, and the number of results requested does not change the price [1][2].

Brave and Perplexity list their search APIs at $5 per 1,000 requests, and Exa's search starts at $4. Brave includes $5 in free credits every month, and Exa offers $10 in free credits a month [4][5][6].

Tavily sells pay-as-you-go credits at $0.008 each, and a basic search costs one credit, which works out to about $8 per 1,000 basic searches [8][9]. Google charges $14 per 1,000 Grounding with Google Search requests on Gemini 3 and newer models after 5,000 free requests a month [7].

The products are not identical. Brave's plan bundles extra LLM context, Google's grounding runs inside a Gemini model call, and Brave's own pricing page argues that list prices tell only half the story [4][7].

Who is it for, and what are the limits?

DeepSeek caps each account at 5 requests per second for Search and 5 for Fetch. The cap applies across all of an account's API keys, and Fetch also has a per-domain limit [1].

Server-side tool calls made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex already hit the two APIs and are free until billing starts at 00:00 Beijing time on 1 November 2026 [1][2]. That makes the APIs most relevant to agent builders who already use DeepSeek models.

On Hacker News, the launch thread had 543 points when we checked on 19 October [10]. Commenters asked how Fetch handles anti-bot protection and whether DeepSeek will pay the creators of fetched pages [10].

Our read

Opinion: At $0.75, search stops being a meaningful line item for agent prototypes. For production use, index quality, extracted content and where queries are processed matter as much as the list price, and DeepSeek's guide says little about the last point.

What we could not verify

• We did not test DeepSeek's Search or Fetch APIs; the index size and daily request volume are DeepSeek's own claims.
• Rival prices are list prices from their pricing pages on 19 October 2026; free tiers, volume discounts and enterprise deals may differ, and each API returns different content per call.
• The Tavily figure of about $8 per 1,000 basic searches is our calculation from its pay-as-you-go credit price and credit rules.
• DeepSeek's Search and Fetch guide does not say where queries are processed or how long they are stored.
• Kagi's API price, cited by Hacker News commenters, could not be checked on a Kagi pricing page.