--- title: "Search APIs cheaper than Tavily (2026)" category: "comparisons" url: https://keirolabs.cloud/blog/search-apis-cheaper-than-tavily --- ## The 60-second version Tavily is the default search API for AI agents, and its pay-as-you-go price is $0.008 per credit with a basic search costing 1 credit, which is [$8.00 per 1,000 basic searches](https://www.tavily.com/pricing), $16.00 per 1,000 advanced. That is a fine price if you never look around. You should look around. As of September 2026, at least seven APIs charge less per 1,000 requests than Tavily's $8.00 baseline: - **Keirolabs /search/lite: $0.25/1k.** That's Keirolabs. Cheapest per request on this list, and also the top scorer in AIMultiple's 2026 agentic search benchmark (15.2/20, ahead of Brave, Firecrawl, Exa, and Tavily). Here, cheap is not a trade against quality. - **Serper: $1.00/1k** ([dropping to $0.30/1k](https://coldiq.com/blog/serper-pricing) if you prepay $3,750). Raw Google SERP. No page content. - **Parallel Turbo/Fast: $1.00/1k.** The cleanest per-request price in the category. 5,000 requests a month free. - **Firecrawl: ~$1.66–$6.40/1k.** Search bolted onto an extraction service; the rate slides with plan volume, and full markdown comes back with the results. - **Brave: $5.00/1k.** An independent index, not a Google scrape. - **Linkup: $5.00–6.00/1k.** European, quality-focused, 10x more expensive for deep search. - **Exa: $7.00/1k.** Neural search; the only one here that is cheaper than Tavily by a rounding error and knows it. We build Keirolabs and we sell the cheapest option on this list, so every number below links to the provider's own page, and the quality claims come with named benchmarks rather than adjectives. On those benchmarks we're not asking for the benefit of the doubt: /search/lite is both the cheapest per request here and the #1 scorer in AIMultiple's 2026 agentic search evaluation, and in a 100-query head-to-head it beat Parallel Turbo 91 times out of 100 with a composite score of 341.6 vs 170.4. The full methodology is at [keirolabs.cloud/bench/keiro-lite-vs-parallel-turbo](https://keirolabs.cloud/bench/keiro-lite-vs-parallel-turbo). ## What Tavily actually charges Tavily doesn't publish a price per search. It publishes a price per credit and makes you do the multiplication. The [pricing page](https://www.tavily.com/pricing) leads with $0.008 per credit; the [credits documentation](https://docs.tavily.com/documentation/api-credits) shows a basic search is 1 credit and an advanced search is 2. So: - Basic search: $0.008 → **$8.00 per 1,000** - Advanced search: $0.016 → **$16.00 per 1,000** - Project plan: $30 for 4,000 credits → **$7.50 per 1,000** basic - Extract: 1 credit per 5 successful URLs → $1.60 per 1,000 pages - Free tier: 1,000 credits per month, no card, resets on the 1st, about 1,000 basic searches or 500 advanced To be fair to Tavily: a basic search returns ranked results *with inline page content*. You are paying for search and extraction in one call. That bundling is the entire defense of the price, and it's a real defense; more on cost-per-answer in a moment. But at 1 million basic searches a month, Tavily is an $8,000/month line item, and the provider next door quotes $250 for the same count. That gap is worth 15 minutes of your attention. ## The cost ladder Every figure is the provider's current published pay-as-you-go rate for a standard search, per 1,000 requests, September 2026, cheapest first. The Index column says where the results come from: a SERP scraper rents Google's rankings, an own-index provider ranks its own. Sources: [Keiro](https://keirolabs.cloud/pricing), [Serper](https://serper.dev), [Parallel](https://parallel.ai/pricing), [Firecrawl](https://www.firecrawl.dev/pricing), [Brave](https://brave.com/search/api/), [Linkup](https://www.linkup.so/pricing), [Exa](https://exa.ai/docs/admin/pricing), [Tavily](https://www.tavily.com/pricing). | Provider | Index | Cheapest real plan | $ per 1k requests | What one request returns | |---|---|---|---|---| | Keirolabs | Own index | /search/lite (0.1 credit/req) | $0.25 | Ranked results, clean metadata | | Serper | SERP scraper (Google) | Starter ($50 / 50k credits) | $1.00 ($0.30 prepaid) | Raw Google SERP (10 results) | | Parallel | Own search infra | Turbo or Fast | $1.00 | Ranked URLs, compressed excerpts | | Firecrawl | Live-web crawl on demand | Standard plan | ~$1.66–$6.40 | Search + full markdown pages | | Brave | Own index (30B+ pages) | Search plan | $5.00 | Web/news results, snippets | | Linkup | Own index + web | Standard search | $5.00–6.00 | Ranked URLs, compressed excerpts | | Exa | Own index (neural + keyword) | Pay-as-you-go credits | $7.00 | Results (+ contents, first 10 free) | | Tavily | Hybrid (crawl + re-rank) | Pay-as-you-go ($0.008/credit) | $8.00 | Results + inline page content |
$ per 1,000 requests, pay-as-you-go, Sept 2026 Keirolabs /search/lite $0.25 Serper $1.00 Parallel $1.00 Firecrawl ~$1.66–6.40 Brave $5.00 Linkup $5.50 Exa $7.00 Tavily $8.00 $0 $4 $8
Cheapest bar, top benchmark score: Keirolabs is both. Serper and Parallel headline $1.00/1k (Serper drops to $0.30/1k with $3,750 prepaid); Firecrawl's rate spans plan volumes. Keiro /search/lite bills 0.1 credit per request on monthly plans; /search/fast runs $2.40/1k on Essential and $0.80/1k on Startup.
The spread is the story. The most expensive option on this ladder costs 32x the cheapest. Nobody would tolerate a 32x spread on compute or storage, but search is priced on vibes and inertia, and the default choice sits at the very top. ## The sub-dollar tier: Keirolabs, Serper, Parallel **Serper** is a scraped Google SERP, and at [$1.00 per 1,000 queries](https://serper.dev) ($50 for 50,000 prepaid credits) it defines the floor for real Google results. Sub-100ms latency, web/news/images/shopping endpoints, 2,500 free queries on signup. The advertised $0.30/1k requires the Ultimate pack: $3,750 for 12.5 million credits. What you get is titles, URLs, and snippets: no page text, no answer, no extraction. If your agent reads pages, Serper is the first half of a pipeline, not the whole thing. **Parallel** has the most honest price sheet in the category: per request, printed in dollars, no credit arithmetic. From [parallel.ai/pricing](https://parallel.ai/pricing): Turbo $1/1k at ~200ms, Fast $1/1k at ~700ms, Basic and Advanced $5/1k for longer excerpts, and 5,000 requests a month free. The trade is content depth; the sub-dollar tiers return ranked URLs and compressed excerpts, not full page markdown. If your use case is "give me the links," Parallel is excellent. If it's "read the pages," you'll be adding an extraction step. **Keirolabs.** [/search/lite](https://keirolabs.cloud/pricing) bills 0.1 credit per request, and a credit is $0.0025, so a search is $0.00025: $0.25 per 1,000. The free tier is 1,250 credits a month, which is 12,500 lite searches, no card, 30 req/min. The Essential plan at $30/month buys 125,000 lite searches, about $0.24/1k; Pro at $50/month is 375,000 searches ($0.13/1k), and Startup at $100/month is 1,250,000 searches ($0.08/1k). /search/lite returns ranked results, not page content; when your agent needs clean markdown, /search/content is 3 credits in the same call, about $7.20/1k on Essential. And on the "cheap means worse" assumption, the data says otherwise: head-to-head against Parallel Turbo, /search/lite won 91 of 100 queries with a composite score of 341.6 vs 170.4, sweeping 6 of 9 task archetypes. Full methodology and per-archetype breakdowns are published at [keirolabs.cloud/bench/keiro-lite-vs-parallel-turbo](https://keirolabs.cloud/bench/keiro-lite-vs-parallel-turbo). **Firecrawl** straddles the tiers: its search endpoint runs [about $1.66/1k on the Standard plan](https://www.firecrawl.dev/pricing), rising toward $6.40/1k on credit top-ups, and it returns full markdown pages because search and crawl are the same machine there. If your agent needs page content anyway, that bundling is the point; if it only needs links, you are paying crawl prices for a SERP. ## The $5 tier: Brave, Linkup, Exa These three are cheaper than Tavily but not cheap, and they charge more for reasons you should evaluate rather than dismiss. **Brave** charges [$5.00 per 1,000 requests](https://brave.com/search/api/) on its Search plan, backed by an independent index of 40+ billion pages: no Google dependency, which matters after the year SERP scrapers have had. Free tier: $5 in credits a month, roughly 1,000 requests, card required. The Answers plan is $4/1k plus $5/M input and $5/M output tokens, which is a different cost model entirely; model your token bill before comparing headlines. **Linkup** prices standard search at [~$5–6 per 1,000 requests](https://www.linkup.so/pricing) ($0.005–0.006 each; they quote €5/1k in their own comparisons). Deep search runs roughly 10x that. Fetch (URL extraction) is $0.001–0.006 per request. You get 4,000 free queries at signup and about $20/month in recurring free credit. The pitch is answer quality: they publish a 94% F-score on SimpleQA, and if their quality saves you one retry loop per hundred queries, the 1.6x price over Tavily's *cheaper competitors* pays for itself. It's still $5.50, not $1. **Exa** is $7/1k for search, with [contents included for the first 10 results](https://exa.ai/docs/admin/pricing) since March 2026 (page contents above 10 results cost $1/1k pages). Free credits: $20 at signup plus $10 every month, call it 1,400 searches a month recurring, which is the most generous recurring free tier here alongside Keiro's. Exa's semantic search finds pages keyword search misses; that's worth $7/1k on discovery queries and overkill on "what is the price of X." ## What the cheap price actually includes This is the table the pricing pages don't want you to build. Two providers can both say "$1/1k" and deliver different amounts of work per dollar. | Provider | $/1k | Page content in the same call? | The catch nobody leads with | |---|---|---|---| | Keiro /search/lite | $0.25 | No; lite is ranked results, and /search/content (3 credits) bundles clean markdown in one call | One-time packs (no subscription needed) bill lite at 0.5 credits/request, $2.50–3.33/1k; monthly plans run $0.08–0.25/1k | | Serper | $1.00 | No; SERP only, you build extraction | >10 results costs 2 credits; prepaid credits expire in 6 months; free 2,500 is one-time | | Parallel | $1.00 | Partial; compressed excerpts, not full text | Full-page depth moves you to Basic/Advanced at $5/1k | | Brave | $5.00 | No; snippets | Card required for the $5/mo free credits; token billing on Answers | | Linkup | $5.50 | Partial; compressed excerpts | Deep search ≈ 10x standard price | | Exa | $7.00 | Yes, first 10 results (since Mar 2026) | Contents above 10 results: $1/1k pages | | Tavily | $8.00 | Yes; inline content on basic search | Advanced search is 2 credits → $16/1k; Research runs 4–250 credits | Read the last column as the actual product comparison. The single number in the middle is marketing. ## Where the cheap option is a trap **Trap 1: price per request vs price per answer.** Serper's $1/1k is real, but it buys Google results, not understanding. An agent that needs page text pays Serper $1/1k plus an extraction service (Jina Reader, Firecrawl, or Keiro's /extract at 3 credits per call), and now the "cheap" stack costs $2–4/1k all-in with two failure modes instead of one. Tavily's inline content is why the $8/1k survives in production. Count calls per solved task, not requests per dollar. **Trap 2: one-time credits dressed as a free tier.** Serper's 2,500 free queries are onetime, not monthly: a weekend of prototyping, then a card. Linkup's 4,000 similar. Compare recurring allowances: Keiro's is 12,500 lite searches every month, Parallel's is 5,000 requests every month, Exa's is ~1,400, Tavily's 1,000. A one-time grant is a demo; a monthly grant is a development budget. **Trap 3: the volume discount you'll never reach.** Serper's $0.30/1k requires $3,750 prepaid. If you burn 100k queries a month, great, that's a real 70% discount. If you burn 20k a month, you'd be prepaying for three years of usage to unlock a rate that saves $700/year against the $1/1k tier. Prepaid credits also expire; Serper's last 6 months. Model your actual volume before chasing the bottom of the ladder. **Trap 4: one-time packs vs monthly plans.** Keirolabs runs both billing types, so the honest comparison is internal: /search/lite is 0.1 credit per request on monthly plans and the free tier. On one-time pay-as-you-go packs, lite bills at 0.5 credits per request, which works out to $3.33/1k on Starter ($10 for 1,500 credits), $3.00/1k on Growth ($30 for 5,000 credits), and $2.50/1k on Scale ($100 for 20,000 credits). That's what packs are for: trying the API or covering a burst without a subscription. If lite is your main workload, the plans are where the real rates live: the same $30 as an Essential subscription buys 125,000 lite searches at $0.24/1k, twelve times what the Growth pack gets you, and Startup at $100/month drops it to $0.08/1k across 1,250,000 searches. Match the billing type to the workload and the headline rate is the rate you pay. **Trap 5: free tiers with a card on file.** Brave's $5/month free credit requires a payment method, and the meter keeps running past it. That's fine for a tracked experiment and dangerous for a prototype someone forgets about. Tavily, Parallel, and Keiro cut you off or stop the meter when credits run out: the safer failure mode while you're still deciding. > The cheapest API is the one whose bill you can predict. On Keiro monthly plans the number on the pricing page is the number on the invoice: a $0.25/1k headline that stays $0.24/1k on Essential ($30/month, 125,000 searches) and falls to $0.08/1k on Startup ($100/month, 1,250,000 searches). One-time packs bill lite at 0.5 credits per request, and Keirolabs prints that next to the headline rather than under it, because a rate you only discover on the invoice is not a rate; it's a trap. ## The boring takeaway Seven APIs beat Tavily's $8/1k in September 2026, and the sub-dollar tier (Keirolabs, Serper, Parallel) costs 8 to 32x less. The ranking that matters isn't price per request; it's price per solved task. Raw SERP at $1/1k plus a separate extractor can lose to Tavily's bundled $8/1k on real workloads, and a bundled 3-credit call (Keiro's /search/content, about $7.20/1k on Essential) can beat both while returning clean markdown. The other half of the decision is quality, and the "cheap means worse" assumption fails the data. In AIMultiple's 2026 agentic search evaluation, Keirolabs scored 15.2/20, first out of the field, ahead of Brave (14.89), Firecrawl (14.58), Exa (14.39), Tavily (13.67), and Perplexity (12.96). On FinanceBench, Keiro leads at 78% accuracy, ahead of Valyu (73%), Parallel (67%), Exa (63%), and Google (55%). And in the direct price-vs-quality matchup this post sets up, /search/lite beat Parallel Turbo on 91 of 100 queries, composite 341.6 vs 170.4, sweeping 6 of 9 task archetypes, with the full methodology published at [keirolabs.cloud/bench/keiro-lite-vs-parallel-turbo](https://keirolabs.cloud/bench/keiro-lite-vs-parallel-turbo). Run the numbers yourself: pick two or three from this list, send your own fifty queries through each, and divide total cost by the tasks your agent actually completed. The cheapest per-request price on this list and the top benchmark score both belong to Keirolabs, and if your fifty queries disagree with both, your numbers win.