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unlob vs the Brave Search API

Brave runs a genuinely independent index of 40B+ pages. It ended its free tier in February 2026 and costs 12.5× more per query.

Verified 5 August 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages

On the headline rate that is 13× — $5 per 1,000 against $0.40. Both figures are computed from the published plan tables rather than typed into this page, so they follow the vendors rather than drifting from them.

Price

  • unlob$0.40
  • Brave Search API$5
Per 1,000 comparable web searches — about ten results, no extraction, no summarisation. Log scale, because the spread is over an order of magnitude.
ProviderOwn index?$ / 1,000 queriesSource
Brave Search API

Search is $5 per 1,000 requests. The Answers plan is $4 per 1,000 plus $5 per million tokens.

Yes

40B+ pages, no Google or Bing dependency

$5Brave Search API pricing
unlob — Build

$29 per month for 50,000 requests.

Yes

Our own crawl and index

$0.58This page
unlob — Scale

$199 per month for 500,000 requests.

Yes

Our own crawl and index

$0.40This page
Rates are the cheapest directly comparable web search call — roughly ten results, no extraction and no summarisation — because that is the only way a table across credit systems, token pricing and per-request pricing means anything. Where a vendor does not publish a flat per-1,000 rate they are omitted from this table and covered in full on the landscape page. Figures read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 5 August 2026.

When Brave Search API is the better choice

A comparison page that cannot name a scenario where the competitor wins is an advertisement. Here are the real ones.

Choose Brave Search API

  • Index size. Brave’s 40 billion pages substantially exceed ours, and for broad consumer queries that shows.
  • A long operating history and a parent company with a consumer browser business behind it.
  • The Answers plan, if you want a grounded summary rather than results to reason over.
  • Image, video and news verticals as first-class products.

Choose unlob

  • Price: $0.40 against $5.00 per 1,000.
  • Agent-shaped responses — metadata-only hits with corroboration and centrality signals, rather than SERP-shaped results.
  • Six coverage-graph traversal tools.
  • why_not, for when you need to explain an absence rather than guess at it.

The substantive differences

Brave Search APIunlob
Free tierA $5 monthly credit. The perpetual free developer tier was retired in February 2026.10,000 requests a month, permanently, with no card.
Response shapeSearch-results shaped — designed for a result page, with an LLM-context option layered on.Agent shaped — metadata-only passages with trust signals attached, and one endpoint to fetch text when you decide you want it.
Rate limit50 queries per second on the Search plan.50 per second on Scale, 200 on Archive, enforced per replica.
Graph and auditNeither.Six traversal tools and a queryable removal ledger.

Sources

Every figure on this page was read from the vendor's own pricing page or funding announcement on the date shown.

Frequently asked questions

Did Brave really remove its free tier?

Yes. In February 2026 Brave retired its long-running free developer tier and replaced it with a $5 monthly credit applied against paid usage. The index and the API are otherwise unchanged.

Is Brave’s index bigger than unlob’s?

Considerably — Brave reports over 40 billion pages. Ours is deliberately bounded: we admit a curated core and fill the tail on demand, optimising for precision of inclusion rather than raw size. Whether that is the right trade depends on whether your agent benefits more from breadth or from a smaller set of better-corroborated passages.

Check the claims yourself

The free tier is 10,000 requests a month with no card. That is enough to test coverage, latency and result quality against your own queries — which is a better comparison than this page.

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