alt Hacker NewsDeepSeek search and fetch – $0.75 per 1000 successful requests
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For comparison that’s $5 with Brave Search API and $12 with Kagi API
Meant as a comparison given the discrepant pricing points:
I pay the Exa premium for semantic retrieval with far higher SNR, plus the academic index [1].
A field like objective can be up to 4096 characters [2] versus ori_question which is limited to 128 here.
How well does this (and similar services) deal with anti-bot protection? What happens if I attempt to retrieve a page protected by the cloudflare checkbox or by Anubis? An error, no useful content, or the actual content I want?
For comparison, Kagi charges $12 per 1000 searches (only talking about their API pricing, like what you’d use with an LLM; their $10/mo plan has unlimited searches but it’s a TOS violation to use those credentials with an LLM).
About a year ago I built my own search and fetch MCP tools for agents based on third-party scraping providers. It is about 15-20x more cost-effective than what OpenAI and Anthropic is offering with their integrated web search and fetch tools. Very impressive that DeepSeek has such a competitive offering today.
I "fetched" a website with hyperlinks and it only returned the text, which makes it a bit irrelevant?
I started to think differently about web search for agents, instead of traditional index, I would prefer to have an agentic WALKER that literally walks through pages and finds out whats needed, even if seeded with some initial web search.
Is AI search where the mysterious relentless crawler traffic is coming from lately?
I'm having trouble finding what this actually is
They're entering the search engine scene since they already have "all of the internet" stored due to the expansive LLM crawling -> training?
DeepSeek Flash really came at a bad time before the Anthropic IPO. I use this thing daily and it’s neck and neck with SOTA models. The search is one of the things setting it apart.
Is there any way to test this without an API key?
I am curious if my large website is in their search results. My company charges $1 per page crawled of our website, and the only traffic that worms through our firewall is using hacked residential ISPs. I really need to know who to send the (large!) bill to.
This is nice. Does search include their LLM data, or does it do real-time search like Perplexity?
We are building our own in-house search API/MCP too, with anti-bot and CAPTCHA workarounds, and we plan to launch Monday morning.
As reference point exa charges 4 bucks
I wonder if this is censored. If not then users in China mainland can use the api to workaround gfw (though there are much better ways)
Can someone explain why fetch costs money. I thought it was your locally-running harness doing it. How can they charge you for that?
DeepSeek models are amazing and this search pricing is fantastic. All these companies like Parallel, Exa and others are gonna have hard time justifying their hefty valuations. Add Perplexity and many others into the mix.
The rate-limit given there seems really low. 5 requests per second?
I wouldn’t be able to use that API in any app with any significant number of concurrent users.
Or am I reading it wrong?
I was really excited to use this (well, I still am), but then I realized Ollama Cloud offer this too, though they don't really mention pricing. I think it's somehow rolled into their subscription.
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These prices will skyrocket eventually. AI companies need more money.
RAM prices will also probably stay very high as long as AI companis act in such a parasitic manner.
Will DeepSeek pay the content creators whom pages were fetched?
What are people actually using these hosted search providers for? For personal use I've found using searxng-ai-kit [1] (disclaimer: I'm the author) or similar tools to be far more cost effective (free!). oh-my-pi uses a similar method and will scrape search results for you out of the box, no api key or search provider needed.
[1]: https://github.com/nikvdp/searxng-ai-kit