Your AI agent just got a free internet connection. On October 17, DeepSeek flipped on web search and page-scraping (Fetch) endpoints for every developer — and for a limited time, it costs you nothing. After November 1, the bill is so small you'll wonder why you ever paid for a search API.
What actually shipped
DeepSeek released two new API capabilities under the same roof as its chat models:
Web Search — let your agent query the live web and get ranked results back.
Fetch — pull the raw, extracted content of any web page, no scraping stack required.
Both are already wired into popular coding agents. If you run Claude Code, Codex, or Harness, your agent can call these tools today through the standard api.deepseek.com base URL. No proxy farm, no HTML parser to maintain.
The price that should worry everyone else
This is where the "free" part stops being a gimmick and starts looking like a land grab:
Free now — the interface is free to use during a limited-time window that opened October 17.
From November 1, 2026 — 5 RMB per 1,000 successful calls (roughly $0.70 per 1,000 requests).
You only pay for wins — failed or empty calls are not billed, so a bad query costs you zero.
Rate limit — 5 queries per second per endpoint, enough for most agent workloads.
Compare that to dedicated search APIs that charge per query at many times the rate, and the math is uncomfortable for the incumbents.
The limits you need to know before you build
Search query length is capped at 128 characters.
Results range from 1 to 50, defaulting to 10.
Billing applies only to successful calls, so over-querying during testing is effectively free until Nov 1.
Why this matters
For years, "give my agent live web knowledge" meant stitching together a search provider, a scraper, and a cleanup layer. DeepSeek just collapsed that into two endpoints at a price near zero. The free window is the obvious move: build, test, and ship your web-connected agent now, then ride a 5-RMB-per-1,000-calls cost into production.
Key takeaway: a web-connected AI agent used to be an infrastructure project. As of October 17, it's a single API call — and it's free until November 1.
Are you still paying for a search API when this is free until Nov 1? 👇
Sources: DeepSeek official API notice (released October 17, 2026), threerouter
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