9 September 2026 · Search & Scraping · 5 min read
I built a web-search-API cost calculator this week — the kind of tool you make when you're about to wire a retrieval layer into an agent and don't want to guess. First number out of it was uncomfortable. At 20,000 queries a month, plain snippet search, no content extraction: Serper costs $20. SerpAPI costs $275 for what is, on paper, the same job — get me Google's results for a query. Same volume, 13.75x price difference, and neither number is a typo.
Five vendors, five different billing shapes. Here's what each actually charges, pulled straight from their pricing pages:
| Provider | Model | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Serper | Flat per-query, prepaid credit pack | ~$1 / 1,000 queries |
| Brave Search API | Per-query, $5/mo account credit | $4-5 / 1,000 queries |
| Exa | Per-search, depth surcharge | $7 / 1,000 (standard), $12 / 1,000 (deep) |
| Tavily | Credit-based, 1,000 free/mo | $0.008 / credit, 2 credits with extraction |
| SerpAPI | Fixed monthly plans, hard cap | $25-$2,750 in 8 steps |
Serper and Brave are the two that behave like normal APIs — you pay roughly linearly for what you use. Exa and Tavily aren't really pricing "search," they're pricing a small AI pipeline: a neural ranking layer, and optionally full-page content extraction cleaned up for an LLM prompt. SerpAPI doesn't price per query at all — it sells eight fixed plans, and you pay for the smallest one that covers your volume, whether you use 1% of it or 100%.
Exa's standard search runs $7/1,000 queries. Ask it to crawl deeper for a harder query and that jumps to $12/1,000 — a depth surcharge, not a flat rate. Tavily runs on credits: a plain search is 1 credit, but a search that also fetches and cleans the full page content (strips nav, ads, boilerplate, hands you something you can chunk and embed straight away) costs 2 credits. Both vendors give you something Serper and Brave don't: at 20,000 queries/month with extraction on, Exa is $240 and Tavily is $312 — expensive next to Serper's flat $20, until you count the engineering hours you'd spend writing and re-writing your own HTML cleaner every time a site redesigns its markup. If the job is RAG ingestion, that premium is usually still cheaper than maintaining a parser.
If you only need links and snippets — you're doing your own re-ranking, or feeding results to your own LLM without needing pre-cleaned page text — the extraction layer is dead weight, and Serper wins by a wide margin at almost any volume. Brave sits in the middle: still a flat per-query rate, no extraction tier, but roughly 4-5x Serper's price with a small $5/month credit that barely moves the needle past a thousand queries. SerpAPI is the odd one out — no per-query rate, just eight step-tier plans (Free 250, then $25/1,000, $75/5,000, $150/15,000, $275/30,000, $725/100,000, $1,475/250,000, $2,750/500,000). Cross a tier boundary by a single query and you pay the full next plan. Its real selling point isn't price, it's breadth — Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, Maps, Shopping, News, Images all through one API, versus the other four which stick to general web/AI search.
| Queries/mo | Serper | Brave | Exa | Tavily | SerpAPI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $1 | $0 (credit floor) | $7 | $0 (free floor) | $25 |
| 5,000 | $5 | $15 | $35 | $32 | $75 |
| 20,000 | $20 | $75 | $140 | $152 | $275 |
| 100,000 | $100 | $395 | $700 | $792 | $725 |
| 500,000 | $500 | $1,995 | $3,500 | $3,992 | $2,750 |
Serper wins at every volume in this table except the very bottom, where Tavily's 1,000 free credits and Brave's $5 monthly credit both cover the whole bill before Serper's $1/1,000 even kicks in below break-even. Past 100,000 queries/month, SerpAPI's fixed $725 plan actually undercuts Exa and Tavily — its step pricing stops looking punitive once you're deep enough into a tier that you're not wasting much of the cap. That crossover is easy to miss if you only ever price one volume and assume the ranking holds everywhere.
Plain snippet search, own re-ranking, any real volume: Serper, not close. Building a RAG pipeline that needs clean page content and don't want to own a scraper: Tavily under 1,000 free searches/month, Exa once you need the deeper multi-page crawl tier. Need more than Google — Maps, Shopping, News, multi-engine — and can live with a monthly cap: SerpAPI, sized to the plan just above your actual usage, not the one you think you'll grow into. Brave is the one I'd skip unless you specifically want Brave's independent index over Google-backed results — its price sits between Serper and Exa without either one's clearest advantage.
New to usage-based pricing? Start with the free API-cost guides. For the Bing-retirement angle on two of these same vendors, see Bing Search API is retiring: what Brave and SerpApi actually cost instead.
Host your retrieval pipeline: DigitalOcean — $200 free credit ↗ · Hostinger VPS ↗
Rates verified against Exa, Tavily, Serper, Brave Search API and SerpAPI's official pricing pages, last checked 2026-09-07. Reference estimates — enterprise contracts, negotiated volume discounts and endpoint-specific tiers (Exa's deep-reasoning search, Tavily's sub-$0.008 committed rates, SerpAPI's Cloud tiers above 500,000/mo) vary; confirm current pricing before budgeting.