Eight currently available developer search API options, each verified from a live provider-controlled page on 2026-11-09 — one page per provider, eight hosts in all. Allowances use different units — requests, searches, or shared credits — and are not directly equivalent, so no common scale is drawn.
Reading the colours: green “No” means the page says no card is needed; red “Yes” means a card on file is required; grey “Not stated” means the cited page did not state the answer — not that no requirement exists. Allowances are shown in each provider’s own units and deliberately not converted. Hover a row to focus it.
| Provider | Search coverage | Free allowance | Free-offer type | Card | Rate limit | Paid price | Caveat | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brave Brave Search API — Search plan | Complete web search results including URLs, text, news, and images, from Brave's own independent index | $5 in free credits every month (part of up to $20 in free calls every month across the API) | recurring free credits | Not stated | 50 queries per second | $5 per 1,000 requests | Brave uses prepaid credits, not subscriptions, so you're only charged for credits you choose to buy; free credits are automatically applied to your account | brave.com |
| Exa Exa Search | Semantic search over Exa's own proprietary web index | $10 of credit a month plus a $10 onboarding bonus, plus free access through Exa MCP with no API key required | ongoing free tier ($10 of credit a month) plus a one-time $10 onboarding bonus, plus free access through Exa MCP | No | 10 queries per second on Search, 100 on Contents, and 10 on Answer | From $4 per 1,000 requests, content included | — | exa.ai |
| Firecrawl Firecrawl Search | web data (public web search) | 500 searches or 1,000 pages scraped per month (1,000 credits every month, refreshed monthly) | ongoing free tier (recurring monthly free credits) | No | 2 concurrent requests, low rate limits; 10 requests/min per endpoint and 2 requests/min team-wide on the Free plan | Hobby: $19/month billed monthly, or $16/month billed annually, for 5,000 credits per month (2,500 searches or 5,000 pages scraped); extra credits 1,000 per $5 | Search costs 2 credits per 10 results, and credits are shared across all endpoints (search results and pages scraped draw on one balance); pay-as-you-go top-ups are available on paid plans only | firecrawl.dev |
| Parallel Search API | web search | $5 free monthly with a card on file, plus up to $80 at signup; up to 5,000 free requests per month | recurring free credits plus one-time signup credits | Yes | 600/min | From $1 per 1k requests | Once credits run out, you pay published API rates for what you use | parallel.ai |
| SerpApi SerpApi | Results from Google, Bing, Baidu, Google Maps, Google Shopping, YouTube, Google Flights, and many other general and vertical search products, plus SerpApi's own web index | 250 searches per month on the Free plan ($0 monthly price) | ongoing free tier (a $0 monthly plan) | Not stated | 50 searches per hour | Starter plan at $25 per month for 1,000 searches | — | serpapi.com |
| Tavily Tavily Search API | real-time web search | 1,000 credits/month | ongoing free tier with recurring monthly free credits | No | — | — | the keyless option (Search and Extract with no account or API key) is free but rate-limited, and the free API key allowance is capped at 1,000 credits per month | docs.tavily.com |
| You.com you-search (You.com MCP Server) | web search | free tier (keyless `?profile=free`) | ongoing free tier | No | — | — | the keyless free profile exposes only you-search and you-discover; enabled tools are the intersection of profile, allowlist, and path | you.com |
| Valyu Valyu Search API | the web, SEC filings, PubMed, arXiv, clinical trials, patents, market data and other datasets | free credits on signup for new accounts | one-time signup credits | No | — | — | — | docs.valyu.ai |
Shortlist of 8 developer search API providers, one row per provider, each figure checked against a live provider-controlled page on 2026-11-09 (8 distinct hosts; no URL backs more than one row). Allowances are quoted in each provider’s own units — requests, searches, or shared credits — and are not converted. “Not stated” and “—” mean the cited page did not state the value. Nothing was cut; all 8 rows appear in the matrix and table.