One thousand searches for five yuan. Half a fen per search—cheaper than printing a sheet of paper.
On October 17, DeepSeek turned its in-house search into two APIs: Search finds webpages, Fetch retrieves their content. It indexes hundreds of billions of webpages and handles hundreds of millions of requests a day. Then it posted the price: five yuan per thousand calls. One yuan for 200. That’s the number.
The price is just the surface. I compared the announcement with the pricing page, and the striking part was how they bill. Failed calls aren’t charged, timeouts don’t count, and empty search results are free. You’re charged only for a call that successfully returns content.
Look through the cloud providers’ price lists and you’ll see that billing per call is the default: once you send a request, it goes on the bill, whether it succeeds or not. This shifts the risk from the buyer back to the seller.
They can do this because they’re the judge. And there’s only one judge. They produce the search results, and they decide whether a call succeeded.
Think one step further, and you get to the blockchain.
A lot of people think micropayments are held back by transaction fees. Send a fen at a time, and miners won’t bother, so it can’t work. That’s only half true. Fees can come down. These days, an on-chain stablecoin transfer costs just a few thousandths of a yuan—not much more than this search API. The thing you can’t bring down is the counter.
There’s no service provider on-chain, just a bunch of nodes that each recalculate everything independently. For a transaction to count, every node has to run the same rules and get the same result. No one has the authority to sign off on behalf of everyone else, and no one can be authorized to keep the books for another person.
So there’s no such thing as “the 50,000th call” on-chain. Who gets to decide? No one has the authority to count it, and no one accepts someone else’s count.
Failed transactions still consume gas. Same principle. The work was dispatched, the nodes processed it, the result didn’t go through, but the bill still has to be settled. On-chain, you can’t charge only for success; you can only deduct first and refund later.
The crypto world has been talking about micropayments for nearly a decade. Lightning Network, state channels, prepaid balances—they’ve all been circling the same problem: how do you count usage accurately when nobody is keeping the books? So far, the thing that’s actually turned half-a-fen-per-call into a business is a centralized API. A little ironic. That’s it.
Midnight on November 1 is the cutoff. Before then, search calls made server-side through Harness, Claude Code, and Codex are free. After that, they’ll be billed per call.
The announcement only gives the unit price. It doesn’t say how calls already being made these past few days will be counted, or whether they’ll be settled by the day or by usage.
The connection to crypto isn’t really about the price; that’s just the hook. When AI starts searching, fetching, and placing orders on its own, payments between agents will be broken down into tiny amounts—just a few thousandths at a time. Who will keep the books then? Whoever keeps the books is the clearing party. If blockchains want to handle this business, being cheap isn’t enough. They first need to make clear how the counter works.
Take a look at your API bill. Of the calls you’ve been charged for, how many returned nothing at all?
$TAO $USDC $BTC
#DeepSeek #AI搜索 #微支付 #Agent
On October 17, DeepSeek turned its in-house search into two APIs: Search finds webpages, Fetch retrieves their content. It indexes hundreds of billions of webpages and handles hundreds of millions of requests a day. Then it posted the price: five yuan per thousand calls. One yuan for 200. That’s the number.
The price is just the surface. I compared the announcement with the pricing page, and the striking part was how they bill. Failed calls aren’t charged, timeouts don’t count, and empty search results are free. You’re charged only for a call that successfully returns content.
Look through the cloud providers’ price lists and you’ll see that billing per call is the default: once you send a request, it goes on the bill, whether it succeeds or not. This shifts the risk from the buyer back to the seller.
They can do this because they’re the judge. And there’s only one judge. They produce the search results, and they decide whether a call succeeded.
Think one step further, and you get to the blockchain.
A lot of people think micropayments are held back by transaction fees. Send a fen at a time, and miners won’t bother, so it can’t work. That’s only half true. Fees can come down. These days, an on-chain stablecoin transfer costs just a few thousandths of a yuan—not much more than this search API. The thing you can’t bring down is the counter.
There’s no service provider on-chain, just a bunch of nodes that each recalculate everything independently. For a transaction to count, every node has to run the same rules and get the same result. No one has the authority to sign off on behalf of everyone else, and no one can be authorized to keep the books for another person.
So there’s no such thing as “the 50,000th call” on-chain. Who gets to decide? No one has the authority to count it, and no one accepts someone else’s count.
Failed transactions still consume gas. Same principle. The work was dispatched, the nodes processed it, the result didn’t go through, but the bill still has to be settled. On-chain, you can’t charge only for success; you can only deduct first and refund later.
The crypto world has been talking about micropayments for nearly a decade. Lightning Network, state channels, prepaid balances—they’ve all been circling the same problem: how do you count usage accurately when nobody is keeping the books? So far, the thing that’s actually turned half-a-fen-per-call into a business is a centralized API. A little ironic. That’s it.
Midnight on November 1 is the cutoff. Before then, search calls made server-side through Harness, Claude Code, and Codex are free. After that, they’ll be billed per call.
The announcement only gives the unit price. It doesn’t say how calls already being made these past few days will be counted, or whether they’ll be settled by the day or by usage.
The connection to crypto isn’t really about the price; that’s just the hook. When AI starts searching, fetching, and placing orders on its own, payments between agents will be broken down into tiny amounts—just a few thousandths at a time. Who will keep the books then? Whoever keeps the books is the clearing party. If blockchains want to handle this business, being cheap isn’t enough. They first need to make clear how the counter works.
Take a look at your API bill. Of the calls you’ve been charged for, how many returned nothing at all?
$TAO $USDC $BTC
#DeepSeek #AI搜索 #微支付 #Agent