Web search APIs for LLMs, priced per 1,000 searches
APIs built for LLMs and agents publish prices from $0.45 (Jina Reader search's $500 package, at its minimum 10,000 tokens a search) to $8.00 (Tavily pay as you go) per 1,000 searches. For 10,000 searches a month in each one's default search type, the cheapest is Serper at $10 ($1.00 per 1,000), for Google results only; of the APIs built for AI, Brave Search API, Jina Reader search, Linkup, Perplexity Search API and You.com at $50 each. In the cheapest search type each one sells, Perplexity Search API's Fast Search costs $10 for the same 10,000.
Cheapest for 10,000 searches a month: Serper at $10 ($1.00 per 1,000). Most expensive: SerpApi at $150.
Each API's cheapest published way to run that many searches in a month, before VAT and before free monthly credits. A search is one request with up to 10 results where the price depends on the count. Jina is priced at its minimum 10,000 tokens a search, and its token package counts in the month it's bought, because its price table doesn't say how long tokens last.
What do 1,000 searches cost at each volume?
| API | 1,000 a month | 10,000 a month | 100,000 a month | 1,000,000 a month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tavily | $8.00 $8/mo | $7.80 $78/mo | $5.00 $500/mo | $7.70 $7,700/mo |
| Exa | $7.00 $7/mo | $7.00 $70/mo | $7.00 $700/mo | $7.00 $7,000/mo |
| Brave Search API | $5.00 $5/mo | $5.00 $50/mo | $5.00 $500/mo | $5.00 $5,000/mo |
| Perplexity Search API | $5.00 $5/mo | $5.00 $50/mo | $5.00 $500/mo | $5.00 $5,000/mo |
| Jina Reader search | $50.00 $50/mo | $5.00 $50/mo | $0.50 $50/mo | $0.50 $500/mo |
| Linkup | $5.00 $5/mo | $5.00 $50/mo | $5.00 $500/mo | $5.00 $5,000/mo |
| You.com | $5.00 $5/mo | $5.00 $50/mo | $5.00 $500/mo | $5.00 $5,000/mo |
| Firecrawl search | $19.00 $19/mo | $9.40 $94/mo | $3.49 $349/mo | $1.75 $1,749/mo |
| Serper Google results | $8.33 $8.33/mo | $1.00 $10/mo | $0.75 $75/mo | $0.50 $500/mo |
| SerpApi Google results | $25.00 $25/mo | $15.00 $150/mo | $7.25 $725/mo | $3.75 $3,750/mo |
Default search type, cheapest published option for that many searches a month, with the month's cost below; bold marks the cheapest. "Custom" means more than the largest published plan.
What does each search type cost?
- Tavily: Basic, fast or ultra-fast search, 1 credit: $5.00 to $8.00 per 1,000; Advanced search, 2 credits: $10.00 to $16.00 per 1,000.
- Exa: Instant: $4.00 per 1,000; Fast or auto (the default): $7.00 per 1,000; Deep-lite or deep: $12.00 per 1,000; Deep-reasoning: $15.00 per 1,000; Each result above 10: $1 more per 1,000 searches.
- Brave Search API: Search: $5.00 per 1,000; Answers: $4.00 per 1,000 plus $5 per million tokens.
- Perplexity Search API: Standard search: $5.00 per 1,000 requests; Fast Search: $1.00 per 1,000 requests; Agent API web_search tool: $2.50 per 1,000 ($1.00 fast), plus model tokens.
- Jina Reader search: Search (s.jina.ai): at least 10,000 tokens, $0.45 to $0.50 per 1,000 at package rates.
- Linkup: Flash, fast or standard search: $5.00 per 1,000 (with an answer or structured output: $6.00); Deep search: $50.00 per 1,000 (with an answer: $55.00).
- You.com: Web Search: $5.00 per 1,000 calls, up to 100 results each; Full page content: $1.00 per 1,000 pages crawled live; Answer API: $5.00 per 1,000 calls.
- Firecrawl search: Search, up to 10 results: 2 credits, $1.50 to $7.60 per 1,000 with a plan used in full; Scraping each result: 1 credit a page more.
- Serper: Starter pack: 50,000 searches for $50, valid 6 months; Standard pack: 500,000 searches for $375, valid 6 months; more in SERP API pricing.
- SerpApi: Starter: 1,000 searches a month for $25; Developer: 5,000 searches a month for $75; more in SERP API pricing.
What does a search return?
- Tavily: Up to 20 results, each with snippets from the page; optionally each page's cleaned content and an LLM-written answer. Cleaned page content on request (include_raw_content); Tavily prices a search by its depth alone. One search: one search request of up to 20 results: 1 credit for a basic, fast or ultra-fast search, 2 for an advanced one.
- Exa: Up to 10 results by default (up to 100), with page contents such as highlights or full text. Page contents come with the search; AI page summaries cost $1 per 1,000 pages. One search: one search request; the price covers up to 10 results, and each result above 10 adds $1 per 1,000.
- Brave Search API: Web results (URLs, text, news, images and more), up to five extra snippets each, and LLM context. Snippets and LLM context; Brave prices no full-page fetch. One search: one request.
- Perplexity Search API: Up to 20 ranked results (10 by default), with text extracted from each page. Extracted page text in each result, with no token charge; the Agent API's fetch_url tool costs $0.50 per 1,000 pages. One search: one successful request, holding up to five queries; a response with no results still counts.
- Jina Reader search: The top five results with their URLs and page contents as LLM-friendly text. The page contents of all five results are in the price. One search: one search request at a fixed number of tokens, starting from 10,000; we price it at 10,000.
- Linkup: Ranked URLs with content snippets for grounding, or an answer with its sources. Snippets in the price; a whole page costs $0.001 to $0.01 per URL through Fetch. One search: one successful call; calls that fail or find nothing relevant aren't charged.
- You.com: Up to 100 web and news results a call, with snippets or highlights. Full pages cost $1.00 per 1,000 pages crawled live; pages served from cache are free. One search: one call, whatever it returns: 1 result or 100 cost the same.
- Firecrawl search: Search results, with each result optionally scraped into page content. Scraping each result adds 1 credit a page: 12 credits for 10 results with their content. One search: each 10 results, rounded up, cost 2 credits from the plan it shares with scraping: 11 results cost 4.
- Serper: Google's results page as structured data: titles, links and snippets. No page text; scraping the result pages is a separate request. One search: one successful query; prepaid credits last six months.
- SerpApi: Google's results page as structured data: titles, links and snippets. No page text; scraping the result pages is a separate request. One search: one successful search; cached, errored and failed searches aren't counted, and a search counts once whatever the number of results.
Which search APIs are free to start?
| API | Free allowance | Searches | Renews |
|---|---|---|---|
| Linkup | $20 of credit a month for accounts signed up with a professional email | 4,000 | Monthly |
| Exa | $10 of credit a month, no card needed, plus a one-time $10 onboarding bonus | 1,428 | Monthly |
| Tavily | 1,000 credits a month, no card needed | 1,000 | Monthly |
| Brave Search API | $5 of credit a month; a card confirms identity but isn't charged | 1,000 | Monthly |
| Firecrawl search | 1,000 credits a month, no card needed | 500 | Monthly |
| SerpApi | 250 searches a month | 250 | Monthly |
| You.com | $100 of free credit, and 100 searches a day through its MCP server with no key | 20,000 | Once |
| Serper | 2,500 searches to try, no card needed | 2,500 | Once |
| Jina Reader search | 10 million tokens with a new API key, for non-commercial use only | 1,000 | Once |
Searches the allowance covers in the default search type. Perplexity Search API lists no free allowance. Exa's monthly credit buys 2,500 searches in its instant type. You.com doesn't say whether its free credit renews, so it counts once.
Quick answers
What is the cheapest web search API for LLMs?
It depends on volume. In each API's default search type: 1,000 a month, Brave Search API, Linkup, Perplexity Search API and You.com at $5.00 per 1,000; 10,000 a month, Serper at $1.00 per 1,000; 100,000 a month, Jina Reader search at $0.50 per 1,000; 1,000,000 a month, Jina Reader search and Serper at $0.50 per 1,000. In the cheapest type each one sells: 1,000 a month, Perplexity Search API at $1.00 per 1,000; 10,000 a month, Perplexity Search API and Serper at $1.00 per 1,000; 100,000 a month, Jina Reader search at $0.50 per 1,000; 1,000,000 a month, Jina Reader search and Serper at $0.50 per 1,000. Serper and SerpApi return Google's results page only; the others are built for AI.
Is there a free web search API for LLMs?
Several give free searches every month. Linkup: $20 of credit a month for accounts signed up with a professional email (4,000 searches); Exa: $10 of credit a month, no card needed, plus a one-time $10 onboarding bonus (1,428 searches); Tavily: 1,000 credits a month, no card needed (1,000 searches); Brave Search API: $5 of credit a month; a card confirms identity but isn't charged (1,000 searches); Firecrawl search: 1,000 credits a month, no card needed (500 searches); SerpApi: 250 searches a month. Once: You.com, $100 of free credit, and 100 searches a day through its MCP server with no key (20,000 searches); Serper, 2,500 searches to try, no card needed; Jina Reader search, 10 million tokens with a new API key, for non-commercial use only (1,000 searches). Perplexity Search API lists no free allowance.
Which search APIs return page content, not just links?
Exa, Perplexity Search API and Jina Reader search put text from each page in the search result at the search price. On request: Tavily returns each page's cleaned content at the same credit cost, You.com charges $1.00 per 1,000 pages it crawls live, Firecrawl 1 credit for each result it scrapes (12 credits for 10 results with their content), and Linkup's Fetch $0.001 to $0.01 a page. Brave returns snippets and LLM context; Serper and SerpApi return Google's titles, links and snippets.
Is there an open-source web search API?
Firecrawl's comparison of its open-source and cloud versions lists "Core scrape, crawl, map, and search APIs" as "Included" in the open-source version, which you host yourself. Jina says of its Reader: "The Reader service code is available on the Jina AI GitHub organization. The models used by Reader, including ReaderLM-v2 and jina-vlm, are licensed CC-BY-NC 4.0, which is not an open-source license."
How much does the Perplexity Sonar API cost?
Perplexity's pricing page no longer lists Sonar: "Sonar Chat Completions support ended on September 27, 2026. Synchronous and streaming requests keep working: they are being reformulated as Agent API requests, rolling out gradually by model." Its Search API costs $5.00 per 1,000 requests, or $1.00 with Fast Search, and the Agent API's web_search tool $2.50 per 1,000 calls plus model tokens.
How much does Jina's search API cost?
Jina's s.jina.ai costs a fixed number of tokens a search, starting from 10,000, and returns the top five results with their page contents. Tokens come in packages: $50 for 1 billion tokens (100,000 searches at the minimum) and $500 for 11 billion tokens (1,100,000 searches at the minimum), so 1,000 searches cost at least $0.45. A new API key comes with 10 million free tokens, for non-commercial use only.
How much does Firecrawl search cost?
2 credits per 10 results, from the same plans as its scraping: Hobby $19 a month for 2,500 searches ($7.60 per 1,000), Standard $99 a month for 50,000 searches ($1.98 per 1,000), Growth $399 a month for 250,000 searches ($1.60 per 1,000) and Scale $749 a month for 500,000 searches ($1.50 per 1,000). Scraping the results adds 1 credit a page, and the free plan covers 500 searches a month.
What replaced the Bing Search API?
Microsoft retired it: "Bing Search APIs will be retired on August 11, 2025. Any existing instances of Bing Search APIs will be decommissioned completely, and the product will no longer be available to be used or new customer signup. Customers are encouraged to migrate to Grounding with Bing Search as part of Azure AI Agents." For a search API you call directly, 10,000 searches a month cost $50 on Brave Search API, Perplexity Search API, Linkup and You.com, $70 on Exa and $78 on Tavily at list prices.
One API at a time: Tavily pricing, Exa pricing, Brave Search API pricing, Linkup pricing, You.com pricing, Serper pricing, SerpApi pricing, and Firecrawl credits for its search. Head to head: Tavily vs Exa, Tavily vs Firecrawl, Tavily vs Brave Search API, Exa vs Firecrawl, Tavily vs Serper, Serper vs SerpApi. Switching: Tavily alternatives, Exa alternatives, SerpApi alternatives.
Need Google's results pages rather than AI search? Every SERP API, from DataForSEO to Bright Data, is priced in SERP API pricing. Scraping the pages yourself? See the scraping cost calculator.
Sources: Tavily, Exa, Brave Search API, Perplexity Search API, Jina Reader (search), Linkup, You.com, Firecrawl Search, SerpApi, Serper, read on the date below. Jina's package prices are drawn by its page's JavaScript and were read in a plain headless browser.
Prices checked against each platform's own pricing page on .