Migrating from Tavily after the Nebius acquisition
Tavily was acquired by Nebius in February 2026. The service continues, but acquisitions prompt re-evaluation — and Tavily never owned a web index.
Nebius Group acquired Tavily for $275 million in February 2026.
Why teams are moving
- Acquisitions reliably prompt a re-evaluation, whatever the acquirer’s intentions.
- Tavily has no publicly documented independent index, so it carries an upstream dependency that owning an index avoids.
- Credit-based pricing at $0.008 per credit means a basic search is roughly $8 per 1,000 and an advanced one $16 — against $0.40 here.
The migration
Get a key
10,000 free requests a month, no card.
Split search from extraction
Tavily returns content with the search result. Here, search returns metadata and /doc/:id returns text. It is one extra call for the passages you actually want, and a large token saving on the ones you do not.
Replace search_depth
There is no effort dial. Choose mode instead: keyword for exact terms and speed, semantic for natural language, hybrid — the default — when unsure. All three cost the same.
Adopt the trust signals
min_independent_sources and collapse=story have no Tavily equivalent and do work you may currently be doing in your own code.
# Before — Tavily
# 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.
| Tavily | unlob | Note |
|---|---|---|
query | q | — |
max_results | limit | — |
search_depth: basic | advanced | mode: keyword | hybrid | Different axis — ours selects a retrieval strategy rather than an effort level, and both cost the same. |
include_domains | site | One host per query; use several queries or a vertical for broader scoping. |
exclude_domains | exclude_site | — |
topic: general | news | content_type / topic | Thirteen content types and twelve topics rather than two buckets. |
days | published_from | — |
include_raw_content | /doc/:id | A separate call, deliberately — so ten results do not cost ten page bodies. |
Authorization: Bearer tvly-... | x-api-key: ulb_... | Bearer also accepted. |
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.
- No Deep Research equivalent. assemble_context packs a corroborated context set, but does not run a multi-step research loop for you.
- LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations are less mature than Tavily’s.
- Search and extraction are two calls rather than one — a deliberate trade, but a change to your code.
What it costs after
Tavily
$8
per 1,000 queries
unlob
$0.40
per 1,000 queries
Difference
20×
cheaper per query
Frequently asked questions
Is Tavily shutting down?
No. Nebius acquired it in February 2026 and continues to operate the service as part of its AI cloud platform. This page is for teams who want to re-evaluate, not for an emergency migration.
Why is unlob so much cheaper than Tavily?
Tavily pays an upstream provider for every search and has to price above that fee; we own our index and have no such fee to cover. That is a structural difference in cost base rather than a difference in margin.
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.