DeepSeek’s free search-tool period reaches its billing deadline

DeepSeek’s published free period for server-side Search and Fetch calls reached its scheduled end at 18:00 South African time on Saturday, 31 October, setting a separate cost to consider for developers using those tools through its API.

The company’s pricing page sets the change for midnight in Beijing on 1 November. That is 16:00 UTC, or 18:00 SAST, on 31 October.

The notice applies to calls made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex when they use the DeepSeek API. It does not establish a price change for every user of those coding applications or for ordinary consumer chat subscriptions.

What the published rates cover

DeepSeek lists Search and Fetch separately at US$0.75 per 1,000 successful requests each. The charge is per request, rather than per search result or model token.

Search locates webpages; Fetch retrieves the contents of a single page. Under the company’s billing rules, a successful search must return results and a successful fetch must return page content. Failed requests, empty searches and timeouts are not billed.

For South African developers budgeting for applications that look up web information, this creates a distinction between model-token costs and the additional web-tool calls. A workflow can use both services, which are priced separately.

The published documentation still describes the calls as free before giving the dated start of billing. EBNewsDaily has verified the timetable and listed prices, not an individual account’s charges or the operational completion of the billing switch.