Priced like infrastructure, not like a research tool

Every plan queries the same index with the same eleven MCP tools and the same coverage graph. What changes is volume, rate and how far back you can reach.

Verified 5 August 2026·Plans mirror the billing service

Free

$0 forever

10,000 requests / month
1 requests / second
30 days of history
All 15 endpoints and 11 MCP tools
Full coverage graph access
Stops at quota

Building, evaluating, and side projects that stay small.

Start free

Build

For a product in production

$29/month

$0.58 per 1,000 queries

50,000 requests / month
10 requests / second
1 year of history
All 15 endpoints and 11 MCP tools
Full coverage graph access
Usage-based overage — see console

A live agent or app with real users.

Choose Build

Scale

For high-volume agent traffic

$199/month

$0.40 per 1,000 queries

500,000 requests / month
50 requests / second
5 years of history
All 15 endpoints and 11 MCP tools
Full coverage graph access
Usage-based overage — see console

Agent fleets and multi-tenant products.

Choose Scale

The free tier is generous on volume and slow on purpose

10,000 requests a month is the largest free quota in the category — twice Parallel's 5,000, ten times Tavily's 1,000, and against a monthly credit rather than a quota at Exa and Brave. We can afford it because a cached query costs us almost nothing, and we need it because you cannot evaluate a search index properly on a thousand queries.

The constraint is the rate limit instead: 1 request per second. That is ample for building, testing and running an evaluation set, and not enough to serve real users — so the tier you outgrow is the one you outgrow on latency, not on a surprise bill. It hard-caps at quota rather than billing you.

How that compares

Provider	Own index?	$ / 1,000 queries	Source
SerpAPI Approximately $25 per 1,000 searches on the Starter plan; the rate falls on higher-volume plans.	No Scrapes Google, Bing, Baidu and others	$25	SerpApi pricing
Grounding with Google Search $14 per 1,000 search queries on Gemini 3.x after 5,000 free prompts per month. Gemini 2.5 models use the older scheme at $35 per 1,000. One prompt can trigger several billed queries.	Yes Google's index	$14	Gemini API pricing
Perplexity Sonar A per-request search fee of roughly $5 to $14 per 1,000 on top of token charges ($1/$1 per million on Sonar, $3/$15 on Sonar Pro). Pro Search mode runs $14 to $22 per 1,000.	Yes Perplexity index	$14	Perplexity API pricing
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	$8	Tavily pricing
Exa Base search is $7 per 1,000 requests. Results beyond the first 10 add $1 per 1,000, contents add $1 per 1,000 pages, and AI summaries another $1 per 1,000 — so a realistic RAG call costs more than the headline.	Yes Proprietary AI-native semantic index	$7	Exa pricing
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	$5	Brave Search API pricing
Google Custom Search JSON API $5 per 1,000 queries after the free allowance, capped at 10,000 queries per day.	Yes Google's index, via Programmable Search Engine	$5	Custom Search JSON API pricing
Parallel Search The Turbo search processor is $1 per 1,000; Basic and Advanced are both $5 per 1,000. The Task API, which is what most agent workloads actually use, runs $5 to $2,400 per 1,000 depending on processor.	Yes Proprietary web index and retrieval infrastructure	$1	Parallel pricing
Serper $1 per 1,000 on the Starter plan, falling to about $0.30 per 1,000 at high volume.	No Google SERP wrapper	$1	Serper pricing
DataForSEO Roughly $0.60 to $1 per 1,000 SERPs depending on endpoint, priority and volume.	No SERP data collection at scale	$0.60	DataForSEO pricing
unlob — Build $29 per month for 50,000 requests.	Yes Our own crawl and index	$0.58	This page
unlob — Scale $199 per month for 500,000 requests.	Yes Our own crawl and index	$0.40	This 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.

The full 2026 landscape, including funding and index ownership →

Frequently asked questions

What counts as a request?

Every authenticated call to the API — a search, a document fetch, a graph traversal or a context assembly. Health and readiness probes and the capability catalog at /describe are unauthenticated and never billed.

What happens when I hit my quota?

On the free tier, requests stop — it hard-caps, because there is no card on file and a surprise bill is worse than a clear stop. On paid plans you keep serving and usage-based overage applies; your current rate is shown in the console.

What does "history" mean on each plan?

It is how far back that tier may query. Free reaches 30 days, Build a year, Scale five years, and Archive the full index with no date floor. It bounds the date range of your filters, not the freshness of results — every plan sees the newest content.

Are the rate limits per account or per replica?

Rate limits are enforced per serving replica, so the effective ceiling in production is generally higher than the published number. The published figure is the guaranteed floor.

Do you have an enterprise plan?

Archive at $799 a month covers 2,000,000 requests, 200 requests a second and the full archive, which handles most workloads that would elsewhere be called enterprise. If you need more than that, or committed capacity, get in touch.

Can I change plans or cancel?

Yes, from the console at any time. Changes apply to every live key on the account in one operation, so you never have a window where some keys are on the old plan.

How is this so much cheaper than the alternatives?

We own the index, so no part of our bill is a per-query fee to an upstream provider — which is the largest cost line for every reseller in this category and the reason their floor sits where it does. What we spend follows how much the API is used rather than how large the index is, so margin widens with volume. The cost model page sets out the full argument.

Start with 10,000 free requests

No card required. The same magic link creates your unlob account and issues your first API key.

Get your API key See the cost model