# DeepSeek Now Bills Agent Web Searches. Price Your Tools In > DeepSeek now charges $0.75 per 1,000 successful Search and Fetch requests. Here is how to meter agent tool calls and price them into your product. - Canonical: https://zeroraised.com/blog/deepseek-search-fetch-billing - Published: 2026-11-01T09:20:09Z - Author: ZeroRaised Team (https://zeroraised.com/blog/authors/zeroraised) - Publisher: ZeroRaised (https://zeroraised.com/) - Section: Growth - Tags: artificial-intelligence, developer-tools, revenue, saas DeepSeek now charges for the web lookups your agent makes. From 00:00 Beijing time on 1 November 2026, the Search and Fetch APIs bill at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests, and DeepSeek's own documentation says server-side tool calls made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex had been free until that moment ([DeepSeek Search and Fetch docs](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/search)). If you resell an agent, your unit cost has just gained a second meter, and it is not measured in tokens. That matters because most founders model an agent as a model price per million tokens. Search and Fetch break that model. They are standalone tools with their own price, their own failure modes and their own rate limits. **TL;DR** - Search and Fetch each cost $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests, billed per request. - Failed calls, empty results and timeouts are free, and `count` does not change the price. - Server-side tool calls through Harness, Claude Code and Codex now bill from 1 November 2026. - A cheap model with heavy searching can cost more than an expensive model with none. - Log tool calls per task, cap them and price with headroom, or your best customers become your worst margin. **Disclosure:** ZeroRaised publishes this analysis and is a launch site for bootstrapped products. Facts come from the linked sources as checked on 1 Nov 2026; ZeroRaised has no commercial relationship with the companies named. **Agent tool call billing** is a pricing model where a provider charges for each executed tool request, such as a web search or a page fetch, rather than only for the tokens the model reads and writes. ## What does DeepSeek actually bill now? The Search API finds web pages for a query and runs on DeepSeek's in-house search engine. The Fetch API retrieves a single page as Markdown. Both are raw JSON APIs with the same bearer auth, at `POST https://api.deepseek.com/v1/tools/search` and `/v1/tools/fetch` ([DeepSeek Search and Fetch docs](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/search)). Search accepts a `count` from 1 to 50 results, defaulting to 10, and supports operators such as `site:`, `lang:`, `after:` and `before:`. That gives you precision without a price penalty, because the request is the billed unit. The important line is the billing rule: per successful request, not by tokens and not by the number of results. Search costs $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests, and Fetch costs the same ([DeepSeek Search and Fetch docs](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/search)). ## Which calls are free? Only successful ones that produce something count. A call is billable when it returns HTTP 200 and a result: non-empty results for Search, page content for Fetch. Failed requests, empty results and timeouts are not billed ([DeepSeek Search and Fetch docs](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/search)). That rule is fair, but it hides a trap: a badly tuned agent that keeps retrying weak queries still pays for every one that returns something. There are also operational limits worth building around: Search allows 100 QPS and Fetch 25 QPS per account, plus a per-domain limit on Fetch. Exceeding them returns HTTP 429, and HTTP 402 means insufficient balance ([DeepSeek Search and Fetch docs](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/search)). ## Why is the token table misleading? The model prices look cheap in isolation. `deepseek-flash` is $0.15 per million cache-miss input tokens off-peak and $0.30 at peak, with output at $0.60 off-peak and $1.20 at peak. `deepseek-v4-pro` is $0.66 and $1.32 for cache-miss input and $1.98 and $3.96 for output. Cache hits cost $0.003 and $0.006 on flash. Both models carry a 1M context window ([DeepSeek models and pricing](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing)). Off-peak is half of peak, and peak hours are 01:00 to 04:00 and 06:00 to 10:00 UTC, Monday to Friday, excluding Chinese public holidays ([DeepSeek models and pricing](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing)). Now add the tool calls. As an illustration, 10,000 searches at $0.75 per 1,000 is $7.50, and the same volume of fetches adds another $7.50, before a single token is generated ([DeepSeek models and pricing](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing)). Token prices do not appear in that sum at all. A research agent that runs several searches and a handful of fetches per task pays the tool bill on every run. That is why the [LLM routing](https://zeroraised.com/blog/what-is-llm-routing) debate is incomplete on its own: routing between models controls one meter and ignores the other. DeepSeek also "reserves the right to adjust" prices ([DeepSeek models and pricing](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing)). Today's $0.75 is a current rate, not a commitment. ## How should you meter tool calls? Treat a tool call as a billable event in your own system, not as an implementation detail. 1. **Log every call with a task ID.** Record the endpoint, the query, the status code and whether it produced a result. 2. **Count calls per task, not per user.** One user can trigger a hundred searches through one workflow. 3. **Cap calls in the agent loop.** Give each task a hard ceiling on searches and fetches, and return a partial answer when it is reached. 4. **Use `count` deliberately.** Since the price does not move with the result count, ask for enough results to avoid a second search. 5. **Schedule batch work off-peak.** If a job does not need to run at once, the half-price token window is free money ([DeepSeek models and pricing](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing)). 6. **Price with headroom.** Add the tool cost to the token cost, then add a margin for retries and bad searches. The [guide to pricing an AI product](https://zeroraised.com/blog/how-to-price-an-ai-product) covers the packaging side, and the [guide to reducing LLM costs](https://zeroraised.com/blog/how-to-reduce-llm-costs) covers the metering habits. The [HubSpot spend caps analysis](https://zeroraised.com/blog/hubspot-ai-spend-caps) is the customer-facing version: a visible ceiling makes an unpredictable bill sellable. ## What this means for bootstrapped founders The lesson is blunt: agent cost is tokens plus tool calls, and the second half is easier to miss because it arrives as a small per-request charge. - **Re-run your unit economics.** If your price was built on token maths, the margin you calculated is out of date. - **Charge for outcomes, not for unbounded research.** A task-based price with a call budget protects you when a user asks the agent to "keep looking". - **Separate search-heavy features from chat.** They have different cost shapes and should not share one credit pool by default. - **Watch the free tier.** A free trial that permits unlimited searching converts your best demo into your largest bill. - **Keep a second provider in reach.** The rate can change, and the [sibling analysis of OpenAI's funding squeeze](https://zeroraised.com/blog/openai-20b-round-ai-spending-scrutiny) looks at the money pressure on the biggest AI vendor. If you sell an agent that browses on the customer's behalf, this shift also asks a product question: is the search part of the value, or is it overhead? If it is overhead, hide it inside a flat task price. If it is the value, meter it and show it. ## Where ZeroRaised fits ZeroRaised is a launch and discovery site for products built without institutional venture capital or accelerator equity. If you have an AI product with a real pricing model, [submit it here](https://zeroraised.com/submit) and state how you meter usage, because clear limits help buyers trust a bill. The [newsletter](https://zeroraised.com/newsletter) carries new analysis like this, and the [pricing page](https://zeroraised.com/pricing) explains the listing options. We make no promise of traffic or results. ## Sources - [DeepSeek: Search and Fetch guide](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/search) - [DeepSeek: models and pricing](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing) ## Frequently asked questions ### What do DeepSeek Search and Fetch cost? Search and Fetch each cost $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests. Billing is per request, so a search that returns 50 results costs the same as one that returns 10. ### Which requests are not billed? Requests that fail, return empty results or time out are not billed. Search is billable only when it returns non-empty results and Fetch only when it returns page content, both with an HTTP 200 response. ### Are tool calls inside Claude Code and Codex billed? DeepSeek says server-side tool calls made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex already hit the Search and Fetch APIs, were free of charge, and now bill per request from 00:00 Beijing time on 1 November 2026. ### Does the number of search results change the price? No. The count parameter accepts 1 to 50 results with a default of 10, and changing it does not change the price. You pay for the successful request, not for how much data comes back.