---
title: "SerpApi pricing in 2026: every plan, cost per 1,000 and the free tier"
category: "comparisons"
url: https://keirolabs.cloud/blog/serpapi-pricing
---

## The 60-second version

**SerpApi costs $25 a month for 1,000 searches on its smallest paid plan and gets cheaper with volume: $7.25 per 1,000 at 100,000 searches and $3.75 per 1,000 at one million.** There is a free plan with 250 searches a month, and only successful searches count.

- **Free plan:** 250 searches a month, 50 per hour, no card.
- **Entry price:** Starter, $25 for 1,000 searches, which is **$25 per 1,000**.
- **Most teams land on:** Production ($150 for 15,000, **$10 per 1,000**) or Searcher ($725 for 100,000, **$7.25 per 1,000**).
- **Cheapest rate:** the Cloud tiers, from **$3.75 per 1,000** at one million searches a month down to about $1.96 at 54 million.
- **What counts:** only successful searches. Cached results, errors and failed searches are free, and a 100-result page counts the same as an empty one.

All plan figures were read from [serpapi.com/pricing](https://serpapi.com/pricing) on October 19, 2026.

## SerpApi plans and price per 1,000 searches

| Plan | Monthly price | Searches / month | Throughput / hour | Price per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 250 | 50 | $0 |
| Starter | $25 | 1,000 | 200 | $25.00 |
| Developer | $75 | 5,000 | 1,000 | $15.00 |
| Production | $150 | 15,000 | 3,000 | $10.00 |
| Big Data | $275 | 30,000 | 6,000 | $9.17 |
| Searcher | $725 | 100,000 | 20,000 | $7.25 |
| Volume | $1,475 | 250,000 | 50,000 | $5.90 |
| Infrastructure | $2,750 | 500,000 | 100,000 | $5.50 |
| Cloud 1M | $3,750 | 1,000,000 | 110,000 | $3.75 |
| Cloud 10M | $21,125 | 10,000,000 | 200,000 | $2.11 |

The Cloud ladder continues in one-million steps up to 54 million searches for $106,050 a month, about $1.96 per 1,000. The pricing page lists no yearly discount.

**The ladder is steep at the bottom.** Going from Starter to Production cuts the per-search price by 60%, and going from Production to Cloud 1M cuts it by another 62%. If your volume sits between two plans, price both: a team doing 20,000 searches a month pays $275 on Big Data, while staying on Production means renewing it early once a month, $300.

## Is SerpApi free?

**Yes, there is a free plan: 250 searches a month, capped at 50 per hour, with no credit card.** It covers every engine SerpApi supports, but it excludes the paid-plan extras: the Legal Shield, ZeroTrace mode and priority support.

250 searches is enough to build and test an integration. It is not enough to run anything in production: a rank tracker watching 50 keywords once a day uses 1,500 searches a month.

## What counts as a search on SerpApi?

**One successful request is one search, regardless of how many results it returns.** SerpApi's pricing page spells out the rules:

- **Successful searches only.** Errored and failed searches are not counted.
- **Cached searches are free.** If you repeat a query that SerpApi has cached, it does not count.
- **Result count does not matter.** A response with 100 results and an empty response each count as one search.
- **Every engine costs the same.** A Google Images, Google News or Bing search is one search, like a Google web search.

Pagination is where bills grow quietly. Google stopped returning 100 results per page in September 2025, so getting positions 11 to 100 now means up to ten requests, and ten searches, per keyword. Price deep rank tracking per keyword-page, not per keyword.

## What happens when you run out of searches?

**SerpApi does not bill overage. You renew the plan early, either automatically or by hand.** With Automatic Early Renewal switched on, the plan renews as soon as the searches are used up, which replenishes the searches and resets the billing cycle. If you downgrade, leftover searches move to an "Extra Credits" balance.

In practice that means a usage spike costs you a whole extra month of your plan, not a per-search overage. Teams with spiky traffic should either size the plan to the peak or keep a cheaper vendor for overflow.

## How do you get a SerpApi API key?

1. **Sign up** at [serpapi.com](https://serpapi.com) with email or Google.
2. **Copy the key** from your dashboard's API key page.
3. **Pass it as `api_key`** on every request:

```bash
curl "https://serpapi.com/search.json?engine=google&q=best+search+api&location=Austin,Texas&api_key=$SERPAPI_KEY"
```

The free plan's 250 searches start immediately. Keep the key on your server: anyone with it can spend your searches.

## SerpApi pricing vs the alternatives

**SerpApi is the most expensive way to buy Google results in this table, and the only one with 40+ engines and the full SERP feature set.** Prices are per 1,000 Google searches at each vendor's published rates.

| Vendor | Price per 1,000 | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| **Keirolabs SERP** | **$0.10** | Raw organic results, same key as search-with-content |
| Scrapingdog (Light) | $1.00 down to $0.14 | 5 credits per Light search ([pricing](https://www.scrapingdog.com/pricing/)) |
| Serper | $1.00 down to $0.30 | Prepaid packs, credits last 6 months ([our guide](/blog/serper-api-guide-2026)) |
| DataForSEO | $0.60 standard queue, $2.00 live | Per 10-result page ([pricing](https://dataforseo.com/pricing/google-serp/google-organic-serp-api)) |
| Bright Data | $1.50 pay-as-you-go, ~$1.31 on Scale | Successful requests only ([pricing](https://brightdata.com/pricing/serp)) |
| SearchAPI.io | $4.00 down to $1.00 | 100 free requests ([pricing](https://www.searchapi.io/pricing)) |
| **SerpApi** | **$25.00 down to $1.96** | 40+ engines, full SERP features, Legal Shield |

At 100,000 searches a month that table spans $10 (Keirolabs) to $725 (SerpApi Searcher). Run the numbers for your own volume in the [SERP and search API pricing calculator](/tools/search-api-pricing-calculator), or see the ranked list in [cheapest SERP API](/blog/cheapest-serp-api).

## When is SerpApi worth the price?

**Pay SerpApi's rate when you need what only it sells: many engines behind one schema, deep SERP features, and a vendor that takes legal responsibility for the scraping.**

- **Worth it:** Google Maps, Shopping, Flights, Scholar or Jobs parsing; Bing, Baidu or Yandex in the same pipeline; procurement that requires the Legal Shield.
- **Not worth it:** organic results only, which is most rank tracking and URL harvesting; or AI agents that need page content rather than links. Google filed suit against SerpApi in December 2025 over this business model, which we cover in [the search API crackdown](/blog/search-api-crackdown-2026-serpapi-lawsuit-bing-shutdown).

**If you only need organic results, the same 100,000 searches cost $10 on Keirolabs' SERP endpoint.** If your agent needs the pages behind the links, Keirolabs' `/search/content` returns ranked results with clean page text in one call. The free tier is 1,250 credits a month with no card. See [SerpApi alternatives](/blog/serpapi-alternatives) for the full switching guide.