DeepSeek Opens Its App's Tools as APIs for Developers
DeepSeek has opened the machinery behind its app, letting developers switch on web search, file reading, page fetching and safety checks inside the existing APIs, with each capability also sold as a standalone endpoint.
The change log says the features are controlled by parameters, and DeepSeek's servers run the tool calls and assemble the context, so a developer does not have to build the search or parsing stack.
And the list runs wider than search. PDFs, Office documents and images arrive as plain text or parsed layout, the model fetches pages that a user links to, and a safety parameter reviews input and output and returns a refusal marker when it finds risk.
The company tells developers serving the public to enable that check and to meet obligations such as content review, model registration and AI labelling.
Search, fetch, optical character recognition, speech recognition and speech synthesis are also available on their own, and DeepSeek open sourced a static web client called chat demo that connects from a browser to the API and can import a user's chat history.
But the tools are billed on top of tokens. Search and fetch cost 0.75 dollars per thousand calls, or five yuan on the China site, parsing and OCR cost 0.225 dollars per thousand pages, speech synthesis is 0.45 dollars per ten thousand characters and recognition 0.116 dollars per hour of audio, with those two voice prices currently halved. Token prices for the deepseek flash model are unchanged at 0.30 dollars per million input tokens and 1.20 dollars per million output, and half that off peak.
The suite runs on the deepseek flash model, which serves the V4.1 Flash 1017 model, and extends the standalone search and fetch endpoints that DeepSeek opened a month ago using its own search engine.
The practical effect is that an agent can look something up, read a PDF and speak the answer without a separate vendor for each step, and search results come back with citations attached.
So the parts of the consumer app are now callable, billed per call and per page, with a safety switch that DeepSeek asks public facing developers to leave on.
Five features can be switched on inside the existing DeepSeek APIs
Search and fetch cost 0.75 dollars per thousand calls
Parsing and OCR cost 0.225 dollars per thousand pages, with voice priced separately
Standalone Search, Fetch, OCR, speech recognition and speech synthesis are available
DeepSeek open sourced a browser client called chat demo
Source: Pandaily
