DeepSeek Started Charging $0.75 per 1,000 Search Calls on November 1, Including the Ones Claude Code Makes. Check Your Setup Before the Bill Does.
DeepSeek's Search and Fetch API stopped being free at 00:00 Beijing time on November 1, 2026. Each tool now costs $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests. DeepSeek's pricing page says that calls made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex were free until then. If you point Claude Code at DeepSeek's Anthropic-compatible API to save on tokens, there is now a second meter running that is priced per call, and you may never have looked at it.
What changed, exactly
DeepSeek's pricing documentation lists Search and Fetch separately at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests each. Only successful requests are charged, and the fees come out of your topped-up or granted balance, with granted balance used first. The same page says requests made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex cost nothing until the billing date. A third-party guide converts the start time to 16:00 UTC on October 31, which matches midnight Beijing time at UTC+8.
That means the clock has already run out. This is not an upcoming change. If you used the setup yesterday, some of it was billed.
Per call, not per token
Token pricing hurts in proportion to how much text you send. Per-call pricing hurts in proportion to how often your agent decides to look something up. Those are different failure modes. A single search is $0.00075, which is nothing. The problem is the loop.
Do a rough sum with made-up numbers: an agent that runs 200 searches and fetches on a busy day costs 15 cents. Thirty days of that is $4.50. But an agent stuck in a retry loop that fires 5,000 successful calls overnight costs $3.75 for the night, and you would never see it in a token count. Failed requests, empty results and timeouts are not billed, so a loop that gets results is the expensive kind. None of these figures come from DeepSeek. They are what the published price implies for the usage I made up.
Why I am flagging it
The amounts are small. What bothers me is the pattern. A tool was free, it sat inside a bundle of other features, and it flipped to metered on a date that was in a changelog. I have been burned by this class of change before, in the form of a free tier that quietly became a paid one while I was busy. A solo operator has no finance team reading changelogs, so the only protection is a habit of checking.
There is a second wrinkle. One guide I read says DeepSeek's Anthropic-compatible endpoint is https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic, and that Claude Code's web search through it now creates billable calls. I could not find a documented switch for turning DeepSeek's built-in search off, so I cannot tell you how to disable it. What I can tell you is how to limit the damage.
A 15-minute audit
Open the DeepSeek dashboard and look at usage since November 1. Find the Search and Fetch lines and write down the count. If you cannot find them, that is information too.
Then check what is pointed at DeepSeek. Search your shell profile, editor settings and project environment files for the DeepSeek base URL and keys. Anything routing a coding agent through it is a source of calls.
Finally, look at the balance. If you topped up $100 and use $10 a month, that is the real exposure, because a runaway loop spends from the whole balance. I would drop it to what I will plausibly use in a month. Granted balance is used first, so a free credit hides charges until it runs out.
Where I could be wrong
The numbers are small and DeepSeek is still cheap. If you were already paying for search elsewhere, $0.75 per 1,000 calls may be a better deal than what you had, and I would not move off DeepSeek over this. Most people will never hit a loop. I am also working from DeepSeek's pricing page and third-party guides, and I did not run a real Claude Code session against it to count calls, so I cannot say how many calls a typical session makes. DeepSeek publishes no per-session figure.
What I'd actually do
I would do the audit tonight, shrink the balance, and add a line to my monthly checklist: "which tools I use stopped being free." It takes two minutes a month and it is the only defense I have against this kind of change. If the dashboard shows a count that surprises me, I would turn search off in whichever client is making the calls and go back to paying for one search provider I chose on purpose.
Author
Lukas
@lukcombinator