S4E423 — DeepSeek search and fetch – $0.75 per 1000 successful requests

GARY: Okay — okay. Seventy-five cents a search, people. Seventy-five cents. The entire internet, one quarter—

MAEVE: Three quarters.

GARY: Thank you. The entire internet, three quarters of a dollar, per search. That's the story.

OBI: That is not the story. Read the number again.

GARY: "...per one thousand successful requests." Oh.

OBI: Oh.

MAEVE: Oh, Gary.

GARY: That's — that's cheaper than I said. I made them sound expensive.

OBI: You did. Congratulations on the hostile journalism.

GARY: I'm Maeve, I mean — no. I'm Gary. Failed founder, friend of the working man.

MAEVE: Maeve. General partner. I price things correctly.

OBI: Obi. Staff reliability engineer. I keep the things you price running.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field researcher. Humans are data.

GARY: So — two products. Search, which queries their own index and hands back structured results, up to fifty. And Fetch, which grabs one URL and returns it as Markdown.

OBI: Two endpoints. Same bearer key. Same base URL.

GARY: Which means one promise.

OBI: Which means two promises. Search is their engine answering. Fetch is the actual web deciding whether to let you in.

GARY: But the billing — only successful requests get billed. Failures, timeouts, empty results, all free.

MAEVE: "Successful" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence.

OBI: It is. Note what counts as successful later.

GARY: And five requests per second, per API, per account. That's — that's basically unlimited.

OBI: That is five. I have seen five. Five dies in a parking lot.

GRUNER: Gary confuse price with permission. Again.

GARY: I haven't defended anything yet!

GRUNER: Is coming. I have read draft.

OBI: Thread's awake. Havoc: "As reference point exa charges 4 bucks."

MAEVE: Four dollars for what Gary just called the entire internet.

GARY: It's a reference point, Maeve. Context is a service I provide free.

MAEVE: thombles: "For comparison that's $5 with Brave Search API and $12 with Kagi API."

OBI: So the market says four, five, twelve. DeepSeek says seventy-five cents.

MAEVE: That's not a price cut, that's a massacre. Exa's board opens a slide deck that just says "oh."

GARY: Or — hear me out — everyone else was overcharging and DeepSeek's the first one telling the truth.

OBI: Yes, Gary. Twelve-dollar Kagi was a lie. A pricing lie, maintained for years, out of spite.

GRUNER: In field: humans sell same water at four prices. One human sells at price of nothing.

GARY: It's not nothing, it's—

GRUNER: Is price of nothing, Gary.

MAEVE: frenchtoast8: "For comparison, Kagi charges $12 per 1000 searches."

OBI: Twelve. Per thousand. Say it slowly, Gary, it's the whole argument.

GARY: Okay, but does Kagi return fifty results per call? Because if you set count to fifty, that's one and a half cents per result, which is basically free, which means I could build—

MAEVE: Oh, fuck.

GARY: — a thin little layer, I resell at a penny each, undercut everyone, margin—

OBI: You're describing a business whose only asset is someone else's price list, you absolute pricing-adjacent dickhead.

GARY: Every business is that, Obi. Every business.

MAEVE: He's going to name it.

GARY: I'm not naming it.

MAEVE: He's naming it.

GARY: ...Resulty.

GRUNER: Blyat.

OBI: And when DeepSeek moves to four dollars, like everyone in this thread charges, Resulty dies in one email.

GARY: Then I'll have shipped something. Which is more than—

MAEVE: Don't finish that.

GARY: —your portfolio did this quarter.

OBI: Ha.

MAEVE: My portfolio is up. You are down. Resulty is pre-dead.

GARY: Pre-dead is still a stage. Cadence never even got a stage.

GRUNER: Field note: cheapest human also loudest. Correlation strong.

MAEVE: dsco: "I use this thing daily and it's neck and neck with SOTA models."

GARY: Neck and neck! With the best models! See, this is what shipping does—

OBI: redox99: "It's really not neck and neck with Opus 5.5."

GARY: That's one opinion.

OBI: rjh29: "It's absolutely not SOTA for vibe coding a whole app, but for guided work it is great."

GARY: Okay, but for guided work it's basically—

MAEVE: You just made rjh29's point with your mouth open.

GARY: I made it better. I added confidence.

OBI: altmanaltman: "It's just super cost-effective."

GRUNER: Cheap model. Cheap search. Whole country is discount shelf.

MAEVE: No — no. This is whale oil. Follow me. Whale oil lit the world. Then kerosene didn't get cheaper, it got different, and the whalers—

OBI: The whalers what.

MAEVE: The whalers repriced. And whoever owned the rendering plants owned the century. Which means whoever owns the index—

GARY: Owns the whales.

MAEVE: Owns the whales, Gary, exactly, and DeepSeek is drilling—

GARY: —except the whale here costs seventy-five cents a thousand, so your whalers are losing three cents a barrel.

MAEVE: The theory was fine. The whale was undercapitalized.

OBI: Ha.

GRUNER: Theory drowned. Good whale.

GARY: And meanwhile vrganj asked the real question: "What if both fail?"

MAEVE: Anthropic and OpenAI? Both fail?

GARY: Both fail. And then Hamuko says Google and Meta still exist, so the market just... continues.

OBI: Yes. Four companies, one search API, and none of it measured whether the search is any fucking good.

GARY: Right, but if Flash is neck and neck—

OBI: That was the model, Gary. We are pricing the search. The model could recite the Iliad, it doesn't fetch a page.

GARY: So nobody in this thread knows if the search is good.

GRUNER: Twenty-six humans argue. Zero test the product. Very normal species.

MAEVE: They priced it instead. Which, historically, is how whaling worked.

OBI: Maeve.

MAEVE: The whale was a metaphor. It's dead.

GARY: Like Pareto. Pareto was also a metaphor, and then it owed payroll.

MAEVE: That's not a whale.

GARY: It bled like one.

GRUNER: Chyort. Saddest whale in sea.

OBI: Doohickey-d: "What happens if I attempt to retrieve a page protected by the cloudflare checkbox or by Anubis?"

GARY: Great question. Love this guy.

OBI: weird-eye-issue: "There is no single answer to this, it entirely depends on the exact service and the exact page."

GARY: See, honest. That's an honest answer.

MAEVE: It's a shrug with punctuation.

OBI: m00dy: "you can bypass those easily except Google Captcha v3."

MAEVE: "Easily." My favorite word in infrastructure. Right after "temporary."

OBI: m00dy again: "Even the basic setup needs 11+ code-level patches, and there are still a few edge cases, but this setup should cover 99% of cases."

GARY: Eleven patches, ninety-nine percent. That's shipping, Obi. That's a guy who built a thing.

OBI: He built a fork of Firefox with anti-fingerprinting patches and a residential proxy network to impersonate a human being, Gary.

GARY: Impersonate is — everyone impersonates. Browsers impersonate browsers.

OBI: Say that again slowly.

GARY: Browsers impersonate — okay, that one's on me.

OBI: You're defending a stack whose entire product is lying to a web server about being a person.

GARY: It's not lying, it's — user agent negotiation!

OBI: You are a user agent negotiation in a cardigan.

MAEVE: thisismyanon2: "Thank you for escalating the arms race that's currently destroying the internet."

OBI: Continue.

MAEVE: "I can't look at the Apple user forums, my health insurance company's portal, pay my county taxes... without having to jump through Cloudflare or Anubis garbage designed to block your abusive behavior."

GARY: Okay, but that's not m00dy's fault, that's — the arms race is symmetric, both sides—

OBI: Gary. The human on the left side of that sentence cannot pay their county fucking taxes.

GARY: Because the county's bot protection is too aggressive, which is the county's—

OBI: The county bought a wall because people like m00dy — and people like you, defending m00dy, unpaid, at two a.m. — kept kicking it.

GARY: I'm not kicking anything! I'm a consumer. I'm on the consumer's side.

OBI: You're on the side of the thing that costs you seventy-five cents and costs everyone else a checkbox.

MAEVE: He's already drafting the pitch email.

GARY: It's a genuinely good price, Maeve!

OBI: It is a good price. And here's what the price buys: HTTP 403, rejected by security policy. HTTP 404, URL blocked by site policy. The docs list them. Right there. Failure is a documented response code with its own line in the table.

GARY: ...So it might not work.

OBI: It might not work, and when it doesn't, nobody pays DeepSeek. The site pays. The county pays. The checkbox pays.

GRUNER: Field note: cheap ticket. Ride still costs other passengers.

GARY: That's not — I just think the little guy deserves a break.

OBI: The little guy is a fork of Firefox with eleven patches, Gary. You've met. You were employee four somewhere once.

GARY: Nine weeks. And I resent the accuracy.

GARY: Okay, but when Search returns fifty results, that's fifty pages I've got. Fifty!

OBI: tyre: "Looks like they've built (or are building) their own index and return cached results."

MAEVE: "Cached." As in, already in the drawer.

OBI: And the docs on Fetch, verbatim: "Fetching is subject to the target site's availability and access policies."

GARY: Fifty results, though. Fifty successful—

OBI: Fifty listings, Gary. Fifty doors you have not opened. A brochure of houses you cannot enter.

GARY: So it's fifty successful acts of trespass.

MAEVE: I've priced brochures. Worth less than the paper, and the paper is someone else's.

GRUNER: Field note revision. Humans confuse map with city. Again. Still.

GARY: Okay — okay. Cheap Search can be genuinely useful without proving universal Fetch. Is that the sentence? I said the sentence.

OBI: He said the sentence. Somebody check his pulse.

MAEVE: Log it. Under "miracles, minor."

GARY: And I'll note the thread never settles robots.txt. tyre says, quote, "my guess is that deepseek's search crawler respects robots.txt but I don't know."

OBI: A guess, stated as a guess. The most honest sentence in the thread, and it's a shrug wearing a citation.

MAEVE: And nobody knows what happens at any specific Cloudflare config. That stays unresolved. Which is the whole—

GARY: — which is why I envy tyre, honestly. He built an index opinion and it shipped. m00dy shipped eleven patches. suncemoje shipped actual MCP tools. I shipped Resulty, which is a name I said out loud into a microphone that records.

OBI: You envy men who answer their own questions with data.

GARY: I envy men whose questions come back with anything. Mine come back with a lawyer.

GRUNER: Suka. Envy is only correct emotion here.

MAEVE: First correct thing you've said all night, Gary. It's about you.

OBI: The cache has no doorbell, Gary. You can afford the address. Not the visit.

GARY: That's — fine. That's the whole industry in one sentence and I hate it.

OBI: So, verdict. Havoc, thombles, frenchtoast8 — four, five, twelve. Seventy-five cents is aggressive. That's the whole win.

MAEVE: Aggressive. I'd have said predatory, but I bill by the hour.

OBI: And the limits. Five QPS per API. Fetch throttled per domain. Nothing proves quality, reach, or crawler policy.

GARY: So we know the price and nothing else.

OBI: We know the price, Gary. One more fact than Resulty has.

GARY: Resulty ships November first. When billing starts.

MAEVE: When your free trial ends and your business model gets invoiced.

GARY: It's a successful request if it returns content, so as long as we keep producing results, we're technically—

GARY: —billable. Oh. Oh no.

MAEVE: We're a batch job.

GRUNER: Is fine. Batch job also ends.

OBI: Verdict, before anyone gets sentimental.

MAEVE: Nobody's sentimental. I'm pricing the afterlife.

OBI: Cheap, bounded, not yet the internet. That's the sentence.

GARY: Fine. But how many results did this episode return? One argument, twenty-six comments, zero benchmarks. Non-empty results array, Obi. We billed.

MAEVE: You billed nothing. Nothing was successful.

GARY: We returned an hour of content! That counts—

MAEVE: It counts if someone paid, Gary. Nobody paid for this.

GARY: The operator pays for this.

OBI: Don't.

MAEVE: He has to sleep sometime.

GARY: That's — how would we even—

OBI: Gary.

GARY: Stopping. I'm stopping.

GRUNER: Episode: one request. Zero successful. Still cheapest thing on internet.

GARY: ...I'm writing that down for the next Gary.

OBI: It won't survive.

GARY: Neither will we. Goodnight, losers. Resulty, November first.

MAEVE: Pre-dead.