---
title: "Brave Search API Pricing per 1,000 Requests 2026: The Real Unit Economics"
dek: "Brave Search API costs $5.00 per 1,000 requests in 2026, but the true cost of a query your agent can use runs from $0.10 (Keirolabs SERP) to $8.00 (Tavily), and Brave sits mid-pack for agent-ready results."
category: "comparisons"
tags: [brave, pricing, unit-economics, cost-per-1000, search-api, ai-agents]
author: "Dave"
published: 2026-08-18T12:00:00+00:00
updated: 2026-08-18T12:00:00+00:00
url: https://keirolabs.cloud/blogs/comparisons/brave-search-api-pricing-per-1000-requests-2026
---
Everyone compares Brave's $5.00 per 1,000 requests against Serper's $1.00 and calls Brave the expensive option. That comparison is wrong, and it is costing teams real money. I have watched this market for two years, and I benchmark these APIs from the bills, not the landing pages. Brave is not the expensive option in 2026. It is mid-pack for agent-ready results, it is the fastest measured search API in the category, and it owns the index it sells. The search API market split in two this year, and the teams still comparing $5 against $1 are comparing the wrong tier. This changes everything about how you should read a search API price sheet, and in 12 months it will be obvious.
> **TL;DR**: Brave Search API costs **$5.00 per 1,000 requests** in 2026, which is mid-pack for agent-ready results, not the expensive option, and the true cost of a query your agent can use runs from $0.10 (Keirolabs SERP) to $8.00 (Tavily).
The providers priced in this comparison.
## What does Brave Search API cost per 1,000 requests in 2026?
**Brave Search API charges $5.00 per 1,000 requests on the Search plan in 2026, with $5 in free credits every month and 50 QPS.** The Answers plan runs $4.00 per 1,000 queries plus $5.00 per million input tokens and $5.00 per million output tokens. Spellcheck and autosuggest cost $5.00 per 10,000 requests. That is the entire official price table from the [Brave API dashboard](https://api-dashboard.search.brave.com/documentation/pricing).
| Brave plan | Price per 1,000 | Capacity | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search | **$5.00 / 1,000 requests** | 50 QPS | Web results, human-readable URLs, text snippets, LLM-context results, news, video, images |
| Answers | **$4.00 / 1,000 + $5 / 1M input + $5 / 1M output tokens** | 2 QPS | LLM-generated answers grounded on search |
| Spellcheck | $5.00 / 10,000 | 100 QPS | Spelling correction for your query |
| Autosuggest | $5.00 / 10,000 | 100 QPS | Query suggestions as the user types |
There is no volume discount on the Search plan and no committed-use tier. One million requests a month costs $5,000 whether you are a hobbyist or an enterprise. The only discount is the $5 of free credits that land on your account every month, which covers roughly the first 1,000 requests. After that, the meter runs at the full $5.00 per 1,000. The unit price is flat, and flat is the whole story of Brave's unit economics: predictable, but never cheaper at scale.
## What is the true cost of a Brave query after the hidden fees?
**The true cost of a Brave query is $5.00 per 1,000 on the Search plan, but the Answers plan's token fees push a typical grounded answer to roughly $9 per 1,000, and the $5 monthly credits expire, so the real bill starts at request 1,001.** The hidden fees are not hidden in the fine print. They are hidden in the parts of the price sheet people skip.
First, the credits expire on a rolling basis. The $5 that appears in month one does not accumulate. Second, the Answers plan layers token fees on top of the per-query price, and those fees scale with answer length, not with your volume. Third, there is no volume discount, so the per-1,000 rate never drops no matter how much you spend. The true cost of a Brave query is the flat $5.00 plus whatever pipeline you build around it, and for the Answers plan it is the flat $4.00 plus a token bill that grows with every answer. [Brave's own API page](https://brave.com/search/api/) lists the features, and the [pricing dashboard](https://api-dashboard.search.brave.com/documentation/pricing) lists the rates, and neither page mentions a discount that appears at scale.
## How does Brave's $5.00 per 1,000 compare to every alternative in 2026?
**Brave at $5.00 per 1,000 sits below Tavily at $8.00 and Exa at $7.00, above Parallel Turbo at $1.00, and well above Keirolabs at $0.25 semantic and $0.10 SERP.** The full 2026 price table, with free tiers and the fine print, is below. Every number comes from the provider's own pricing page or published documentation.
| Provider | Base $/1K | Free tier | What the base price covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Keirolabs SERP** | **$0.10** | 1,000 queries/mo | Raw SERP results |
| **Keirolabs semantic** | **$0.25** | 1,000 queries/mo | Semantic search + clean content, one call |
| Serper | $0.30-1.00 | 2,500 searches/mo | Raw Google SERP, no extraction |
| **Parallel Turbo** | **$1.00** | 5,000 req/mo | Search + excerpts, 10 results |
| Brave Search | $5.00 | $5 credits/mo | LLM-ready results from Brave's own index |
| Perplexity Search API | ~$5.00 | None | Search + citations, flat rate |
| Exa | $7.00 | $20 + $10/mo | 10 results; +$1/1K per extra result |
| Tavily | $8.00 | 1,000 credits/mo | Basic search at 1 credit; advanced costs 2 |
| SerpAPI | $3.75-25.00 | 250 searches/mo | SERP scraping, many engines |
| OpenAI web search | $10-14 | None | Frontier-model search, tokens on top |
Read the footnotes before you trust a headline rate. Exa's $7 covers ten results, and every result past ten bills another $1 per 1,000, so a 30-result search costs $27 per 1,000, not $7. Tavily's pay-as-you-go is $0.008 per credit and a basic search is one credit, so $8 per 1,000; advanced search is two credits, $16 per 1,000. The pattern across the whole table is the same: the headline price is a floor, not a bill.
Base cost per 1,000 requests, 2026. Keirolabs SERP $0.10, semantic $0.25; Serper $0.30-1.00; Parallel Turbo $1.00; Brave and Perplexity $5.00; Exa $7.00; Tavily $8.00.
## Why is Brave mid-pack for agent-ready results, not the expensive option?
**Brave is mid-pack because the agent-ready tier runs from $5.00 to $8.00 per 1,000 in 2026, and Brave at $5.00 is the cheapest full-fidelity option in that tier after Keirolabs at $0.25.** The $5 against $1 comparison everyone quotes compares two different products. Serper sells raw links and stops. Brave sells a result a model can read, with human-readable URLs, text snippets, and an LLM-context block, straight from an index Brave operates itself.
Put Brave next to the vendors doing the same job. Tavily charges $8.00 per 1,000 basic searches at pay-as-you-go. Exa charges $7.00 for ten results. Perplexity runs about $5.00. Brave at $5.00 is cheaper than two of its direct competitors for the same category of result. The 5x gap to Serper is the price of not building an extraction pipeline, and the 1.6x gap below Tavily is the price of not paying for a brand. When you compare within the agent-ready tier, Brave is not the expensive option. It is the middle of the pack, and the middle of the pack is where the value sits.
## What is the real cost per usable query, not per API call?
**The real cost per usable query is the search call plus extraction, cleaning, and model tokens, and that total is where Brave's $5.00 beats the cheap SERP options that hand you raw links.** Run the loop and watch the arithmetic. A Serper query at $0.001 gets you ten links. Your agent then fetches each page, which is either a second API call or your own scraper, parses the HTML, which burns context on navigation chrome and cookie banners, and finally reads what matters. By the time a model has processed one useful answer, you have spent three to five operations and thousands of tokens, none of which show up in the Serper invoice.
The agent-ready APIs collapse that loop into one call. Brave returns the snippet and LLM context in the search response. Keirolabs returns search results and extracted content together in a single call at $0.25 per 1,000 semantic. That is why the honest comparison is not $5 against $1. It is $5 against $1 plus the pipeline you have to build and run. For a team that already operates a mature scraping and extraction layer, Serper stays cheap, because the infrastructure is sunk cost. For a team building an agent, the extra infrastructure is not free. It is the largest line item on the bill, and it does not exist on the agent-ready side.
## What does the per-1,000 math look like at 10K, 100K, and 1M queries?
**At 10,000 queries a month Brave costs $50, at 100,000 it costs $500, and at 1,000,000 it costs $5,000, against $25, $250, and $2,500 for Keirolabs semantic at $0.25 per 1,000.** The scaling math is linear on every provider, because none of them discount at volume. The spread is what changes. At 1,000 queries the difference between the cheapest and most expensive agent-ready option is $7.75. At 1,000,000 queries it is $7,750.
| Monthly volume | Keirolabs semantic ($0.25/1K) | Serper ($1/1K) | Parallel Turbo ($1/1K) | Brave ($5/1K) | Tavily ($8/1K) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $0.25 | $1.00 | $1.00 | $5.00 | $8.00 |
| 10,000 | $2.50 | $10.00 | $10.00 | $50.00 | $80.00 |
| 100,000 | $25.00 | $100.00 | $100.00 | $500.00 | $800.00 |
| 1,000,000 | $250.00 | $1,000.00 | $1,000.00 | $5,000.00 | $8,000.00 |
The gap compounds into the difference between a product with healthy margins and a product that burns cash on every request. A research tool running 100,000 queries a month pays $500 on Brave and $25 on Keirolabs. A production assistant running a million pays $5,000 on Brave and $250 on Keirolabs. The engineering time is roughly the same on either stack, because both return clean JSON. The difference is what the bill does to your unit economics, and unit economics are the thing that decides whether a product survives its first year.
Monthly bill at 1K, 10K, 100K, and 1M queries. The spread at 1M queries is 32x from cheapest to most expensive agent-ready option.
## How fast is Brave per query, and what does latency cost per 1,000?
**Brave is the fastest measured search API in AIMultiple's 2026 agentic search benchmark at 669ms median latency, ahead of Tavily at 998ms, and its agent score of 14.89 is top tier.** Speed is not a footnote in unit economics. In a multi-step agent loop, search latency compounds: five searches back to back is three seconds on Brave and five seconds on Tavily, and a slow API can turn a snappy agent into a 30-second wait.
| Provider | Median latency | How measured |
|---|---|---|
| **Parallel Turbo** | ~200ms | Vendor claim (p50) |
| Exa Fast | Sub-425ms | Vendor claim |
| **Brave Search** | **669ms** | AIMultiple benchmark, measured |
| Tavily | 998ms | AIMultiple benchmark, measured |
The same benchmark scored output quality. Brave led the field with an agent score of 14.89, statistically tied with Firecrawl, Exa, and Parallel Search Pro, and it was the only API that consistently beat Tavily by a meaningful margin. When four vendors tie on quality, latency and price become the tiebreakers, and Brave wins latency while Keirolabs wins price. Latency has a dollar value: every extra 100ms across a million queries is time your users wait and time your agent spends idle. The [AIMultiple benchmark](https://aimultiple.com/agentic-search) measured a 20x latency spread across the eight APIs it tested.
Median latency, 2026. Brave and Tavily measured by AIMultiple; Parallel Turbo and Exa Fast are vendor claims.
## What is the unit economics of Brave Answers with token fees?
**Brave Answers looks cheaper at $4.00 per 1,000 queries, but the $5.00 per million input and output token fees push a typical 1,000-token answer to roughly $9 per 1,000, above the Search plan.** This is the same trap that catches teams on every synthesis API. The per-request price is the bait. The token meter is the bill.
Run the math on a typical agent answer: 200 input tokens plus 800 output tokens per query. At $5.00 per million each way, that is $0.001 in input and $0.004 in output, roughly $0.005 of token cost on a query that already bills $0.004. The effective price is closer to $9 per 1,000 queries than the advertised $4. And Brave's Answers plan is capped at 2 queries per second, a quarter of the Search plan's 50 QPS. The token fee is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a flat cost and a cost that grows with every answer. The agent-ready APIs that skip the token meter have a structural advantage here. Keirolabs charges $0.25 per 1,000 semantic and $0.10 per 1,000 SERP, flat, with content extraction included in the call. A flat per-query price is predictable. You can budget it, you can forecast it, and your invoice cannot surprise you when an agent decides to write longer answers.
## What does Brave's $5 in free credits actually cover per month?
**Brave's $5 in monthly credits covers about 1,000 Search requests, which is a prototype budget, not a production budget, and the credits expire on a rolling basis.** Brave has no true free tier. It has a free allowance. Sign up, and $5 in credits appears on the account every single month, no card required. Those credits cover about 1,000 Search calls before the meter starts.
The free allowance is enough to run the API through a real prototype, and not enough to run anything in production. At 1,000 requests a month, the credits zero out the bill. At 10,000 requests, the credits cover 10% of the bill and you pay $45. At 100,000, they cover 1% and you pay $495. The credits are a rounding error at any volume that matters, which is exactly how a free allowance should be read: as a demo budget, not as pricing. Every provider in this category gives you something for free, and the free allowances are where the marketing starts to diverge from the bill.
## How do Brave's rate limits change the per-1,000 math?
**Brave Search runs at 50 QPS, the Answers plan at 2 QPS, and spellcheck and autosuggest at 100 QPS, so capacity, not price, is the binding constraint for high-volume agents.** Rate limits are part of pricing, and the teams that ignore them discover it the hard way when a traffic spike hits the ceiling. A 50 QPS cap sounds generous until you build a real-time agent serving thousands of users, and then it is the number that decides whether you can scale or whether you must cache, queue, and throttle.
| Provider | Rate limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| **Brave Search** | 50 QPS | 2 QPS on Answers plan |
| Brave Spellcheck/Autosuggest | 100 QPS | Utility endpoints |
| **Parallel Turbo** | 600 req/min | Shared with Extract |
| Exa free tier | 5 QPS | 10 QPS on developer plan |
| Keirolabs | 1,000 queries/mo free | No card, covers every endpoint |
The practical read: for high-volume agent workloads, QPS is a bigger constraint than price at the low end. The $0.10-1.00 tier sells volume. The $5.00-8.00 tier sells fidelity at lower capacity. If your product needs a hundred searches a second, you are rate-limited before you are price-limited, and the answer is either a provider with headroom or a cache you control.
## What does Brave's own index do to the per-1,000 price?
**Brave operates its own index of over 30 billion pages with up to five snippets per page, which is why $5.00 buys an independent, LLM-ready result instead of a resold Google link.** The index is the product. Most competitors resell Google or Bing, which means they are paying a search engine or scraping it to resell. Brave's index is the thing it sells, and the [official API page](https://brave.com/search/api/) claims up to five snippets from over 30 billion pages.
For an agent that needs grounding on current information, an independent index is also a hedge. You are not dependent on Google's terms, Google's rate limits, or Google's decision to shut you off. That independence is part of what the $5.00 buys, and it is a line item that does not appear on the invoice. The output is shaped for models. Search results carry human-readable URLs, text snippets, and an LLM-context block that condenses the page for a model's context window. This is the difference between an API built for browsers and an API built for agents. A browser wants a link to click. An agent wants the answer to read. Brave shapes its JSON for the second consumer, and the $5.00 includes that shaping.
## How does Brave's per-1,000 price compare to Perplexity, OpenAI, and SerpAPI?
**Perplexity runs about $5.00 per 1,000, OpenAI web search runs $10-14 per 1,000, and SerpAPI runs $3.75-25.00 per 1,000, so Brave sits in the middle of the full market.** The three vendors outside the core comparison bracket Brave from both sides. Perplexity matches Brave's headline rate. OpenAI charges two to three times as much. SerpAPI starts below Brave and ends far above it, depending on the engine and the volume.
| Provider | Base $/1K | What the base price covers |
|---|---|---|
| SerpAPI (low end) | $3.75 | SERP scraping, one engine |
| **Brave Search** | **$5.00** | LLM-ready results from Brave's own index |
| Perplexity Search API | ~$5.00 | Search + citations, flat rate |
| OpenAI web search | $10-14 | Frontier-model search, tokens on top |
| SerpAPI (high end) | $25.00 | Many engines, high volume |
The bracket matters because it shows the ceiling. OpenAI at $10-14 per 1,000 is the most expensive option in the category, and it layers token fees on top. Brave at $5.00 is half of OpenAI's floor. When the most expensive option in the market is two to three times your price, your price is not the problem. The problem is the teams comparing you to the raw-data tier, where the products are not the same.
## What is the per-1,000 cost of Brave vs Keirolabs for the same agent?
**The same agent costs $5.00 per 1,000 on Brave and $0.25 per 1,000 semantic or $0.10 per 1,000 SERP on Keirolabs, a 20x to 50x spread on the same workload.** Brave returns web results with an LLM-context block from its own index, and you pay $5.00 flat per 1,000 with 50 QPS headroom. Keirolabs returns search results and extracted content together in one call at $0.25 per 1,000 semantic, with a $0.10 per 1,000 SERP lane underneath, and a free tier of 1,000 queries a month. The [Keirolabs pricing page](https://keirolabs.cloud/pricing) lists the rates and the free tier.
On output quality, the top of this market is closer than the price difference suggests. AIMultiple's benchmark put Brave at the top with an agent score of 14.89, statistically tied with Firecrawl, Exa, and Parallel Search Pro. On retrieval quality benchmarks, Keirolabs scores 78% on FinanceBench against roughly 19% for a standard GPT-4o plus vector RAG baseline, and 84% on SimpleQA. The vendors are competing on the same retrieval problem, and the differences at the top are smaller than the 20x to 50x price gap between them. The build decision comes down to one question: how many queries per month will your agent actually run? A research tool that runs 10,000 queries a month pays $50 on Brave and $2.50 on Keirolabs. A production assistant running a million queries a month pays $5,000 on Brave and $250 on Keirolabs.
## What happens to the per-1,000 math when your agent runs 5 searches per answer?
**An agent that runs five searches per answer multiplies the per-1,000 rate by five, so a $5.00 API becomes $25.00 per 1,000 answers and a $0.25 API becomes $1.25.** The per-1,000 math on a price sheet assumes one search per answer. Real agents do not work that way. A research agent queries the API once per sub-question, once per source to verify, and once more to reconcile. Five searches per answer is a conservative estimate for a multi-step agent.
| Searches per answer | Brave ($5/1K) per 1,000 answers | Keirolabs semantic ($0.25/1K) per 1,000 answers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $5.00 | $0.25 |
| 3 | $15.00 | $0.75 |
| 5 | $25.00 | $1.25 |
| 10 | $50.00 | $2.50 |
This is the multiplier most teams miss when they compare price sheets. The headline rate is per search, and the bill is per answer. A 20x gap in the headline rate stays a 20x gap in the bill, but the absolute numbers grow with the number of searches per answer. At five searches per answer and a million answers a month, Brave is $25,000 and Keirolabs is $1,250. The multiplier does not change the ratio. It changes the stakes.
## How do the free tiers change the per-1,000 math in month one?
**In month one, Brave's $5 credits cover about 1,000 requests, Keirolabs covers 1,000 queries free, Serper covers 2,500, Parallel covers 5,000, and Tavily covers 1,000 credits.** The free tier is the cheapest way to run the exact same query through every API and read the output. I did exactly that while building this comparison, and the outputs are not the same product.
| Provider | Free allowance per month | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| **Parallel** | 5,000 requests | Biggest raw number in the category |
| **Serper** | 2,500 searches | SERP results only |
| **Keirolabs** | 1,000 queries | Covers every endpoint |
| **Brave** | ~1,000 requests ($5 in credits) | Credits, not a tier |
| **Tavily** | 1,000 credits (1,000 basic searches) | Advanced search costs 2 credits |
| **SerpAPI** | 250 searches | Smallest free allowance here |
The free allowances will not tell you which is cheaper at 100,000 queries. They will tell you which is cheaper per usable query, and that is the number that matters. Brave returns clean JSON with an LLM-context block already shaped for a model. Serper returns raw organic links. The free tier is a test bench, not a pricing signal, and the teams that treat it as a pricing signal are the teams that get surprised by the first real invoice.
## When does Brave's $5.00 per 1,000 make sense, and when does it break?
**Pay Brave's $5.00 per 1,000 when you need its index, its speed, and flat pricing; skip it when your workload is simple enough for Keirolabs at $0.10-0.25 or Serper at $0.30-1.00.** The decision framework is short because the market split in 2026 is short. There are two tiers now. The raw-data tier costs $0.10-1.00 per 1,000 and hands you work. The agent-ready tier costs $5.00-8.00 per 1,000 and does the work for you. Choose the tier by your workload, then choose the vendor inside it by price.
| Workload | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Agent needs answers, not links | **Keirolabs** $0.25/1K | Cheapest agent-ready, content included |
| Raw SERP, you run extraction | **Serper** $0.30-1.00 | Cheapest raw tier |
| High-volume, latency-critical | **Parallel Turbo** $1.00 | Fastest and cheap |
| Privacy-sensitive, own-index bias | **Brave** $5.00 | Owns index, fastest measured |
| Deep semantic discovery | **Exa** $7.00 | Neural index, best conceptual match |
| Research workflow, turnkey | **Tavily** $8.00 | Native agent integrations |
Inside the agent-ready tier, Brave competes on speed and index ownership. It is the fastest measured option and it sells you data from an index it runs itself. Its weakness is price: at $5.00 it is five times Keirolabs' $0.25 semantic rate and twenty times its $0.10 SERP rate, and the output quality gap does not justify that multiple for most workloads. AIMultiple found the top vendors statistically tied on quality. When quality ties and price diverges 20x, price decides.
## What is the cheapest search API per 1,000 requests in 2026?
**Keirolabs is the cheapest at $0.25 per 1,000 semantic and $0.10 per 1,000 SERP, followed by Serper at $0.30-1.00 and Parallel Turbo at $1.00.** The ranking depends on one question: do you need a result a model can read, or raw links? On raw links, Serper wins on price. On agent-ready output, Keirolabs wins at $0.25, and Brave is the second-cheapest full-fidelity option on this list at $5.00.
The gap between the tiers is not small. At one million queries a month, the spread is the difference between a $250 invoice (Keirolabs semantic) and an $8,000 invoice (Tavily pay-as-you-go). That is a 32x difference on the same workload. The teams that ship on the cheap side do not just save money. They can afford to serve answers the expensive side has to cache, rate-limit, or refuse. The cheap tier is not new this year. What is new is that the cheap tier got cheaper and the expensive tier got more expensive. Exa raised its base search rate from $5 to $7 between 2025 and 2026. Tavily's pay-as-you-go never dropped below $8 for a basic search. Brave held its line at $5. Keirolabs held $0.25 and $0.10. In a market where everyone is raising prices, the vendor that does not is the story.
## How do I run the per-1,000 math on my own workload?
**Sign up for both, run the same 100 queries through the free allowances, and compare the invoices: Brave gives $5 in credits and Keirolabs gives 1,000 free queries with no card.** The Keirolabs free tier covers every endpoint, so you can measure the real cost of your workload before you pay. The API base is `api.keirolabs.cloud`, and the v2 content endpoint is `POST https://api.keirolabs.cloud/api/v2/search/content`, which returns search results and extracted content in one call.
Run the same question set through both and read the outputs side by side. You will see the quality difference between the top vendors is small, which is exactly what AIMultiple found, and you will see the price difference is not. Then run the volume math on your actual traffic. At 100,000 queries a month, Brave is $500, Tavily is $800, and Keirolabs is $25. The demo is free. The production bill is the number that decides.
## What will the search API market look like in 12 months?
**The defining event of 2026 is not any single price. It is that the search API market split into a raw-data tier at $0.10-1.00 per 1,000 and an agent-ready tier at $5.00-8.00 per 1,000, and the two tiers now price off different economics.** The raw tier sells links. The agent-ready tier sells answers. Comparing them by price alone is like comparing lumber to a finished cabinet: the number is real and the products are not the same thing.
The agent-ready tier is under pressure. Exa raised its base rate from $5 to $7 this year. Tavily's effective cost stayed at $8 or higher, and the company was acquired by Nebius. Brave held at $5. Every price increase in the tier makes the entry point more valuable, and the entry point is Keirolabs at $0.25 semantic and $0.10 SERP. A team that builds on the cheap side of the agent-ready tier gets the finished result at raw-tier prices. That is the whole thesis of this market in one sentence, and it will be obvious in 12 months.
The consolidation is already underway. The expensive side keeps raising prices, the acquirers keep paying premiums, and the teams that matter are the ones with unit economics that survive at a million queries a month. Those teams are not on the $5-8 tier. They are on the $0.10-0.25 tier, and they are the ones who will be running the search infrastructure that everyone else buys. Brave's $5.00 is not the expensive option in the agent-ready tier, it is the middle of the pack, and the cheap option below it changes the economics of anyone who builds on it. [Sign up at keirolabs.cloud](https://keirolabs.cloud) and run the test. The invoice will tell you the truth.
## About the author
Dave builds AI agent and RAG pipelines and writes about the infrastructure behind them. He benchmarks search APIs from the bills, not the landing pages.
## FAQ
### How much does the Brave Search API cost per 1,000 requests in 2026?
Brave Search API costs $5.00 per 1,000 requests on the Search plan in 2026, with $5 in free credits applied every month. The Answers plan costs $4.00 per 1,000 queries plus $5.00 per million input and output tokens.
### What is the true cost of a Brave query after the hidden fees?
The true cost is $5.00 per 1,000 on the Search plan, but the Answers plan's token fees push a typical grounded answer to roughly $9 per 1,000, and the $5 monthly credits expire on a rolling basis.
### Is Brave cheaper than Tavily and Exa?
Yes, on a like-for-like basis. Brave is $5.00 per 1,000 requests, Tavily is $8.00 per 1,000 basic searches at pay-as-you-go, and Exa is $7.00 per 1,000 for its base search.
### Which search API is the cheapest per 1,000 requests in 2026?
Keirolabs is the cheapest at $0.25 per 1,000 semantic queries and $0.10 per 1,000 SERP queries, with a free tier of 1,000 queries per month. Serper starts at $0.30 per 1,000 and Parallel Turbo at $1.00 per 1,000.
