Skip to content
unlob
Get an API key

unlob vs Tavily

Tavily pioneered LLM-shaped search responses and was acquired by Nebius for $275M in February 2026. It does not own an index; unlob does, at a twentieth of the price.

Verified 5 August 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages

On the headline rate that is 20× — $8 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
  • Tavily$8
Per 1,000 comparable web searches — about ten results, no extraction, no summarisation. Log scale, because the spread is over an order of magnitude.
ProviderOwn index?$ / 1,000 queriesSource
TavilyAcquired

Credit-based at $0.008 per credit pay-as-you-go. A basic search is 1 credit (~$8 per 1,000), an advanced search 2 credits (~$16 per 1,000), and a deep research request 4 to 250 credits.

No

No publicly documented independent web index

$8Tavily 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 Tavily 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 Tavily

  • Search and extraction in one call, which genuinely reduces the number of moving parts in a simple RAG stack.
  • Deep Research requests, which have no equivalent here.
  • The most mature LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations in the category.
  • Being part of Nebius, if you are already on that AI cloud.

Choose unlob

  • Price: $0.40 against roughly $8 for a basic search and $16 for an advanced one.
  • An index we own, rather than a retrieval layer over other providers.
  • Graph traversal and corroboration counts.
  • Coverage transparency.

The substantive differences

Tavilyunlob
IndexNo publicly documented independent web index — a retrieval and cleaning layer over other search providers.Our own crawl and our own index, with no upstream search provider.
Pricing modelCredits at $0.008 each pay-as-you-go: 1 credit for basic search, 2 for advanced, 4–250 for deep research.A flat monthly quota. Every endpoint costs one request, including graph traversal.
OwnershipAcquired by Nebius Group for $275M, February 2026.Independent and self-funded.
ExtractionReturns extracted content with the search result.Metadata first, text on request — deliberately, so a ten-result search does not consume the context window.

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

Who owns Tavily now?

Nebius Group agreed to acquire Tavily for $275 million in February 2026, integrating it into the Nebius AI cloud and its Token Factory product. Tavily had previously raised $25 million — a $5 million seed and a $20 million Series A led by Insight Partners.

Does Tavily have its own index?

There is no public documentation of an independent Tavily web index. It operates as an AI retrieval layer over web search, which is a legitimate architecture — it simply carries the upstream dependency that owning an index avoids.

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.

Get your API keySee the full landscape