Bing Search API Is Retiring: What Brave and SerpApi Actually Cost Instead

30 August 2026 · Search & Data · 5 min read

Microsoft is shutting down the standalone Bing Web Search API. If your product calls it — a RAG pipeline grounding answers in live web results, a research tool, anything that needs "what does the web say right now" — you have to pick a replacement, and the two obvious ones price almost nothing alike. I ran the numbers on Brave Search and SerpApi against what Bing used to charge, at the volumes most side projects and small SaaS tools actually hit.

What Bing used to cost, for reference

Bing Web Search billed per 1,000 transactions: roughly $15–$25 per 1,000 queries on the standard tiers, with a small free allowance of about 1,000 queries a month. That pricing still shows up in old integration docs and Stack Overflow threads, which is exactly the trap — new builds can't provision it the same way anymore.

The two real replacements, priced

The math at 5,000 queries a month

Pick 5,000 queries/month because it lines up exactly with SerpApi's Developer tier boundary:

At 10,000 queries/month the gap gets sharper: Brave is 2,000 free plus 8,000 billed at $3/1,000, so $24 total. SerpApi needs to jump past its Developer tier into a higher bracket. Old Bing pricing at $15–$25/1,000 would have landed at $150–$250. Brave comes out roughly 6–10x cheaper than what Bing used to charge for the same volume of raw web results.

Why the gap is this wide — and where it isn't fair

This isn't quite apples to apples. Brave gives you a link list: URLs, titles, snippets, nothing more. SerpApi gives you a fully rendered, parsed search-engine results page — ad blocks, knowledge panels, Maps and Shopping results, with proxy rotation and CAPTCHA-solving baked in. If what you actually need is "does this page rank for this keyword" or "what does an actual Google SERP look like," Brave can't answer that at any price — you need SerpApi, Serper.dev, or SearchAPI.io, all of which scrape and parse Google rather than running their own index.

But if what you need is web-grounding for an LLM answer, a RAG context fetch, or "find me pages about X" — plain link results, which is most of what the old Bing API was used for — Brave's own index at $3/1,000 is the direct, much cheaper replacement. Paying SerpApi's parsing premium for a job that doesn't need parsing is money wasted every single month.

What I'd actually do

Match the tool to the job instead of defaulting to whichever one shows up first in a migration guide:

• Web-grounding, RAG context, "find pages about X" → Brave Search API, priced against your real query volume.
• Need the actual Google SERP — rankings, ads, Maps/Shopping blocks → SerpApi, worth the premium because it's doing real scraping work for you.
• Building a search box inside your own app/site, not searching the open web → that's Algolia's job, a different category entirely (records indexed, not queries against the web).
• Web search tool cost calculator — plug in your monthly query volume across providers.

Full category breakdown at search APIs, or start from the free API-cost guides if you're new to this.

Prices are provider list prices as tracked in our catalog (Brave/SerpApi last verified 2026-08-15) and are reference estimates — confirm current rates on each provider's pricing page before budgeting. Bing figures are historical, kept for comparison only.