Alternatives
Mojeek alternatives
A UK independent crawler and index, running since 2004. Small by comparison, but genuinely its own — and the oldest independent index still standing.
Verified 7 October 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages
Mojeek at a glance
- Vendor
- Mojeek Ltd
- Category
- Own-index search APIs
- Own index
- Yes — Fully in-house index, crawling since 2004
- Price per 1,000
- Not published as a flat rate
- Free tier
- Free trial with limited queries, on request
- Rate limit
- 5 queries / sec, 100,000 / day (Startup); 10 / sec, 400,000 / day (Business)
- MCP server
- No
- Graph traversal
- No
- Coverage transparency
- No
Pricing detail. Startup is £2 per 1,000 queries (pay as you go, up to 10 results, excluding VAT) and Business £3 per 1,000. Priced in GBP only, so there is no published USD rate to compare without a currency conversion we will not estimate.
Why teams look for a Mojeek alternative
Mojeek is rarely abandoned out of dissatisfaction. It is abandoned because a workload outgrew it: the index is small relative to the well-funded incumbents, and a product that needs to answer across the long tail will find gaps. The honest framing is that the same independence that makes Mojeek interesting also caps its scale.
The second reason is the API surface. There is no MCP server, and the interface is built around conventional search rather than around the things an agent needs — filterable trust signals, corroboration counts, an answer about why something is absent. A team building an agent ends up reconstructing those in application code.
Where Mojeek beats us
They have been crawling since 2004 and the index is entirely their own, which makes them the oldest continuously independent web index still operating. That is not a small thing: it means no upstream provider can deprecate them, and the crawl has accumulated material that a newer index has simply never seen. For a project whose priority is independence from the large platforms, they are a serious choice and their record is longer than ours.
Every page in this section names this. A comparison that cannot say where the other product wins is an advertisement.
The alternatives
unlob
$0.40/1kWe crawl and index the web ourselves, like the vendor on this page, so there is no upstream provider who can deprecate or reprice us. The index is smaller than the well-funded incumbents, deliberately bounded rather than exhaustive, and the difference in the bill is not marginal. What you get on top is six coverage-graph traversal operations and an endpoint that explains any absence.
Exa
$4/1kNeural, embeddings-first search over a proprietary index, sold alongside content extraction, answers and agentic research products.
Parallel Search
$1/1kA suite of web search, extraction and research APIs on a proprietary index, from the former Twitter CEO. The closest competitor to unlob by thesis.
Brave Search API
$5/1kA genuinely independent index of 40B+ pages, sold as a conventional search API with an LLM-context option. Long the default independent choice.
Free developer tier removed February 2026
Perplexity
$1/1kRaw web search over its own index through the Search API, and search with synthesis through the Agent API, which replaced Sonar Chat Completions in September 2026.
DataForSEO
$0.60/1kIndustrial SERP infrastructure built for SEO tooling rather than agents. The cheapest per query in the field, with the lowest-level API to match.
Serper
$1/1kThe cheapest way to get raw Google results into an agent. Fast, minimal, and entirely dependent on Google continuing to be scrapeable.
Bright Data
$1.50/1kProxy and unblocking infrastructure with a scraping suite and an agent-facing MCP server. Built for volume collection, priced accordingly.
Linkup
$5/1kA French grounding API returning structured, citation-carrying content for LLMs, with a sub-second "fast" tier and native parallel search.
Sources
- Mojeekread 7 October 2026
Frequently asked questions
What is the best alternative to Mojeek?
It depends what you are replacing. If you need an independent index at the lowest price, unlob is $0.40 per 1,000 searches. If you need the largest possible index, Mojeek may still be the right tool — we say so on our comparison page rather than pretending otherwise.
Does Mojeek own its own web index?
Yes — Fully in-house index, crawling since 2004. That matters because a provider without its own index inherits the deprecation and repricing risk of whoever it depends on.
How much does Mojeek cost?
Startup is £2 per 1,000 queries (pay as you go, up to 10 results, excluding VAT) and Business £3 per 1,000. Priced in GBP only, so there is no published USD rate to compare without a currency conversion we will not estimate.
Try the cheapest own-index alternative
10,000 free credits a month, no card. Test coverage and latency against your own queries before you commit to anything.