ScrapeMeter

You.com search API pricing

You.com charges $5 per 1,000 Web Search calls, whatever the number of results up to 100, so 1,000 results cost as little as $0.05 at 100 a call. Full page content costs $1 per 1,000 pages crawled live (cached pages are free), the Contents API $1 per 1,000 pages, the Answer API $5 per 1,000 calls and the Research API $12 to $1,200. You.com offers $100 of free credit, 20,000 searches by its count, and 100 free searches a day through its MCP server without a key.

Every You.com API, per 1,000

APIPricePer 1,000
Web Search$5calls, up to 100 results each
Full page content$1pages crawled live
Contents$1pages
Answer$5calls
Research, lite$12calls
Research, standard$50calls
Research, deep$100calls
Research, exhaustive$450calls
Research, frontier$1,200calls

"You.com uses a pay-as-you-go credit system for API access. You only pay for what you use." Web Search returns "LLM-ready snippets or highlights with rich metadata" by default.

What does a result cost?

Results a call1,000 callsPer 1,000 results
10$5$0.50
20$5$0.25
50$5$0.10
100$5$0.05

A call costs the same whatever it returns, so asking for more results lowers the price per result.

What does a month cost?

Searches a monthWeb SearchWith every page crawled live
1,000$5$25
10,000$50$250
100,000$500$2,500
1,000,000$5,000$25,000

The second column is the most a search with 10 results and full page content can cost: 20 pages (10 web and 10 news results) crawled live, at $1 per 1,000 pages. Pages served from cache are free.

Quick answers

How much does the You.com search API cost?

$5 per 1,000 calls, up to 100 results each: "One request to an endpoint is one billable call, whatever it returns. A Web Search call returning 1 result and one returning 100 cost the same." 10,000 searches a month cost $50, against $70 on Exa (auto).

Is the You.com API free?

You.com's pricing page offers "$100 free credit = 20,000 searches", and, with no API key or account, "100 Web Search API queries/day via MCP". It doesn't say whether the credit renews.

How much does You.com charge for full page content?

$1 per 1,000 pages crawled live, on top of the search: "The ceiling for this call is $0.025, when all 20 pages are crawled live. The floor is $0.005, which is what extraction_source: "cache" costs on any call, with no extraction charge at all." So 1,000 such searches cost $5 to $25.

How much does the You.com Research API cost?

By effort tier, per 1,000 calls: lite $12, standard $50, deep $100, exhaustive $450 and frontier $1,200.

How much does the You.com Answer API cost?

$5 per 1,000 calls for a cited answer from live web results, the same as a Web Search call. The Contents API, for pages you already have the address of, is $1 per 1,000 pages.

You.com against the other search APIs

10,000 searches a month, each API's cheapest published option in its default search type:

  1. Serper$10/mo$1.00 per 1,000 searches. Starter pack: 50,000 searches for $50, valid 6 months.
  2. Brave Search API$50/mo$5.00 per 1,000 searches. Search: $5.00 per 1,000, no monthly fee.
  3. Jina Reader search$50/mo$5.00 per 1,000 searches. $50 package: 100,000 searches for $50. Priced at the minimum 10,000 tokens a search; packages count in the month they're bought.
  4. Linkup$50/mo$5.00 per 1,000 searches. Standard search: $5.00 per 1,000, no monthly fee.
  5. Perplexity Search API$50/mo$5.00 per 1,000 searches. Standard search: $5.00 per 1,000, no monthly fee. Up to five queries in one request count once.
  6. You.com$50/mo$5.00 per 1,000 searches. Web Search: $5.00 per 1,000, no monthly fee. Up to 100 results a call at the same price.
  7. Exa$70/mo$7.00 per 1,000 searches. Pay as you go (auto): $7.00 per 1,000, no monthly fee. Up to 10 results; each result above 10 adds $1 per 1,000 searches.
  8. Tavily$78/mo$7.80 per 1,000 searches. Project: $30 a month with 4,000 searches, then $8.00 per 1,000. Credits past a plan's limit at the pay-as-you-go $0.008 a credit.
  9. Firecrawl search$94/mo$9.40 per 1,000 searches. Hobby: $19 a month with 2,500 searches, then $10.00 per 1,000. 2 credits per 10 results, from plans shared with scraping; extra credits in $5 increments.
  10. SerpApi$150/mo$15.00 per 1,000 searches. Production: 15,000 searches a month for $150.

Price your own volume on every one in web search APIs for LLMs.

Sources: You.com billing docs and You.com's pricing page, read on the date below.

Prices checked against each platform's own pricing page on .