The Brave Search API free tier ended — what now
Brave replaced its long-running free developer tier with a $5 monthly credit in February 2026. For projects built on the free tier, that is a new bill; for onboarding funnels that depended on it, a problem.
Brave retired its perpetual free developer tier in February 2026.
Why teams are moving
- A $5 monthly credit covers about 1,000 search requests, after which usage is billed.
- Projects that were free are now line items, which for side projects and evaluations changes the calculation entirely.
- Teams re-evaluating on price generally find that the gap is 12.5×, not marginal.
The migration
Get a key
One magic link, 10,000 free requests a month, no card. Enough to run a full comparison before switching anything.
Swap endpoint and header
https://api.unlob.com/search, with X-Subscription-Token becoming x-api-key. The q parameter is unchanged.
Convert freshness buckets
Brave’s pd, pw and pm become explicit published_from timestamps. More precise, and it distinguishes publication date from crawl date, which Brave does not.
Run both in parallel
Point a copy of your traffic at both APIs and compare results on your own queries for a week. The free tier is enough for that, and it is a far better test than any comparison page.
# Before — Brave Search API
# After — unlob
curl -H "x-api-key: $UNLOB_API_KEY" \
"https://api.unlob.com/search?q=your+query&limit=10&collapse=story"Parameter mapping
Most of this is renaming. The entries marked with a dash are the ones that need a different approach rather than a different name.
| Brave Search API | unlob | Note |
|---|---|---|
q | q | Same parameter, same boolean support. |
count | limit | — |
offset | — | Filter to narrow rather than paging deep. |
search_lang | lang | — |
freshness | published_from / published_to | Explicit timestamps rather than pd/pw/pm buckets. |
safesearch | safe | Boolean rather than off/moderate/strict. |
result_filter | content_type | — |
X-Subscription-Token | x-api-key | — |
What you will lose
A migration guide that claims a clean swap is not a migration guide. These are the things that genuinely do not map.
- Brave’s index is larger — over 40 billion pages. For broad consumer queries you may notice.
- No image, video or news verticals as separate products.
- No summariser equivalent to Brave’s Answers plan; assemble_context returns passages with reasons rather than prose.
What it costs after
Brave Search API
$5
per 1,000 queries
unlob
$0.40
per 1,000 queries
Difference
13×
cheaper per query
Frequently asked questions
Did Brave really remove its free tier?
Yes. In February 2026 Brave retired the perpetual free developer tier and replaced it with a $5 monthly credit applied against paid usage. The API and index are otherwise unchanged.
Is unlob’s free tier permanent?
It is 10,000 requests a month with no card and no expiry, and it hard-caps at quota rather than billing you unexpectedly. We would rather not repeat what just happened to everyone building on someone else’s free tier.
Port it on the free tier first
10,000 requests a month, no card. Enough to run both APIs side by side against your own queries before you change anything in production.