DeepSeek’s agent app is growing much faster than its chatbot ever did. On Sunday the company said on X that DeepSeek Harness, its open-source agent application, reached 1.54 million daily active users on 4 November, less than three months after it launched on 13 August. Bloomberg’s report, carried by O Globo, puts that against about 271,000 daily users at the end of September, shortly after the desktop version we covered in October. That is close to a sixfold rise in about five weeks.
92 trillion tokens a day
The figure that stood out to us was compute. Bloomberg says Harness uses about 92 trillion tokens a day, which works out at roughly 60 million tokens per daily user. A chatbot user doesn’t come close to that. An agent that reads repositories, opens files, calls tools and browses the web for hours does. DeepSeek is relying on outside developers to drive that usage. According to PANews, Harness already has about 35,000 third-party plugins, and roughly 60% of active users have created or installed at least one.
The new commitments are an official plugin marketplace where developers can publish plugins and users can find them, a more stable and compatible plugin API, stronger plugin security, and a plugin author support programme offering token funding, technical exchange and promotion. There is an expression-of-interest form, but DeepSeek hasn’t published participation rules or support amounts yet.
Reliability is the catch
Growth has come with outages. TokenPost reports a partial outage on Saturday 7 November that hit Chat Service, the DeepSeek V4 Pro API and the V4.1 Flash API, with users seeing a “server busy” message. It followed a similar incident on 3 November that affected the same three services, and the five-hour October outage we covered at the time. If agents are using about 92 trillion tokens a day, outages like these are unsurprising, and anyone building on DeepSeek should plan for them.
Why search people should care
Harness is where DeepSeek’s Search and Fetch APIs are actually used. Since 1 November, Search and Fetch calls from agent harnesses have been billed. At 1.5 million daily users running long tasks, DeepSeek’s own index and fetcher are becoming one of the bigger retrieval systems outside Google, and agents don’t browse the way people do. They issue many short queries, fetch pages and quote small parts of them.
The plugin marketplace matters for the same reason. Plugins decide which data sources an agent can reach directly. When we covered DeepSeek’s ¥105.5bn round, investors including Meituan, Trip.com and Xiaohongshu had reportedly been asked what data they could bring. A marketplace is an obvious place for that data to appear as first-party plugins. If a travel or restaurant query in Harness goes to a Trip.com or Meituan plugin rather than the open web, ranking in DeepSeek’s index matters less for that query.
What to do now:
- Check your server logs for DeepSeek’s fetcher and make sure your important pages are reachable without JavaScript-only rendering.
- If you run a data-heavy product, such as listings, prices or reference data, look at whether a Harness plugin is a sensible distribution channel once the marketplace rules are published.
- Keep an eye on our DeepSeek Model Updates page. We’ll add the marketplace launch when it happens.
The daily user figure is DeepSeek’s own, counted by connections to its servers, and hasn’t been independently audited. Even so, the direction is clear: DeepSeek is building an agent platform, and that platform now has more than a million daily users.