Alternatives
Valyu alternatives
A London deep-search API spanning web plus licensed proprietary sources, with content attribution and pay-per-use monetisation for publishers.
Verified 7 October 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages
Valyu at a glance
- Vendor
- Valyu
- Category
- Retrieval layers
- Own index
- Partial — Web plus licensed proprietary corpora
- Price per 1,000
- Not published as a flat rate
- Free tier
- $10 in free credits ($20 with a work email)
- MCP server
- Yes
- Graph traversal
- No
- Coverage transparency
- No
Pricing detail. Billed per result returned rather than per query: $1.50 per 1,000 web results ($0.50 for open databases, $8 financial, $30 to $50 proprietary). The per-search cost depends on how many results you ask for, so there is no per-1,000-searches rate to put in a table.
Why teams look for a Valyu alternative
Valyu spans the open web plus licensed proprietary corpora, and the reason teams look elsewhere is usually that they only needed the first half. Paying for access to licensed material you do not query is a poor trade, and the pricing does not decompose into a simple per-search rate you can model.
The second reason is coverage transparency in the specific sense of knowing what you searched. When a result set mixes open-web and licensed sources, reproducing a past answer means knowing which corpus each passage came from, and that is a harder question than it sounds.
Where Valyu beats us
The licensed corpora are the point, and they are material we do not have and will not crawl. For a workload where the authoritative source sits behind a commercial licence rather than on the open web, no amount of open-web coverage substitutes for it. Their publisher attribution and pay-per-use monetisation are also a more constructive answer to the rights question than most of this category has managed.
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 own the index the answers come from rather than layering over an upstream provider, so there is nobody above us who can change terms. Like a retrieval layer we return model-ready passages with citations; unlike one, we can tell you why a URL is absent, because we hold the ledger that records it.
Tavily
$8/1kAn LLM-shaped retrieval layer returning cleaned, ranked, cited chunks rather than raw SERPs. Acquired by Nebius in February 2026.
Acquired by Nebius Group for $275M, February 2026
Linkup
$5/1kA French grounding API returning structured, citation-carrying content for LLMs, with a sub-second "fast" tier and native parallel search.
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.
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.
Serper
$1/1kThe cheapest way to get raw Google results into an agent. Fast, minimal, and entirely dependent on Google continuing to be scrapeable.
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.
Bright Data
$1.50/1kProxy and unblocking infrastructure with a scraping suite and an agent-facing MCP server. Built for volume collection, priced accordingly.
Exa
$4/1kNeural, embeddings-first search over a proprietary index, sold alongside content extraction, answers and agentic research products.
Sources
- Valyu pricingread 7 October 2026
- Valyu pricing documentationread 7 October 2026
Frequently asked questions
What is the best alternative to Valyu?
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, Valyu may still be the right tool — we say so on our comparison page rather than pretending otherwise.
Does Valyu own its own web index?
Partly — Web plus licensed proprietary corpora. It operates its own retrieval layer but is not a fully independent web index.
How much does Valyu cost?
Billed per result returned rather than per query: $1.50 per 1,000 web results ($0.50 for open databases, $8 financial, $30 to $50 proprietary). The per-search cost depends on how many results you ask for, so there is no per-1,000-searches rate to put in a table.
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.