The IT Home page is stamped 2026/10/18 19:59:52 and gives no time zone. It says DeepSeek announced today that the API now supports web search and page fetch, billed per request, at 5 yuan for every 1,000 successful requests. The 5 yuan is the price printed on the page, in yuan. The same piece does not say whether a failed request is billed, and it gives no comparison with another search price.

[1]
A closed stack of pages with a charcoal top
A thick stack of pages, the top sheet painted charcoal, with a muted blue edge and a small oxide-red mark at the base., AI-generated illustration, not a news photograph

The announcement splits “already callable” from “billing has started.” People using the DeepSeek API inside DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code, or Codex already reach Search and Fetch through a server-side tool call. Those calls are not billed now. Billing per call begins at 00:00 Beijing time on 1 November 2026. The unit price is public, and the billing date is still ahead. Calls before that clock, on this account, remain unpaid.

[1]

The launch day and the price day are not the same day. This piece says that, according to an earlier IT Home report, DeepSeek announced on 17 October that the Search and Fetch APIs were live. Both use DeepSeek’s own search engine and supply current web content to agents and retrieval applications. That sentence is the earlier report. It is not the price newly stated today. What this page adds is the 5-yuan unit price and the 1 November 00:00 start.

[1]

The piece describes the two interfaces only at this level: Search runs a query and returns structured results; Fetch takes one page and returns the title and body in Markdown. There is no free quota, no definition of a successful request, and no statement on whether an unsuccessful request after 1 November counts toward the 5 yuan. What can be checked here is that one outlet says DeepSeek announced the price today and said billing has not started.

[1]