Brave Search API free tier alternatives
10,000 searches, no card.
Brave no longer has a free plan. Its Search plan costs $5 per 1,000 requests and includes $5 in free credits every month, which is 1,000 requests. Brave asks for a card, and its launch post ties the credit to attributing Brave on your website.
SpecStream answers Brave's own /res/v1/web/search call in Brave's JSON. A new account gets $10 of credit with no card: 10,000 searches of up to 10 results. After that, $1 per 1,000.
It is the most accurate web search API in the world: 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 SimpleQA Verified questions, on the benchmarks page.
New accounts get $10 of credit, no card. It covers 10,000 searches.
Free tiers that replace the Brave Search API, from each company's own page
| SpecStream | Brave Search API | Tavily | Exa | Serper | Firecrawl | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you get free | $10 of credit on a new account. It does not expire | $5 in free credits every month on the Search plan | 1,000 API credits a month, reset on the first day of each month | $10 of credits a month plus a $10 onboarding bonus | 2,500 free queries | 1,000 credits every month |
| Searches it covers | 10,000 Brave calls of up to 10 results | 1,000 requests at $5 per 1,000 | 1,000 basic searches, or 500 advanced at 2 credits each | Up to 2,500 searches of up to 10 results at $4 per 1,000 | 2,500 queries | 500 searches |
| Card needed | No | Yes. Brave says the card is to prevent abuse | No | No payment method required | No | No |
| Other conditions | None. The credit runs every product on the account | Brave's launch post asks you to attribute the Brave Search API on your website or about pages to get the credit | When the monthly credits run out, requests stop until they reset or you upgrade | The monthly credit resets, the onboarding bonus comes once | Credits are taken for each successful response | 10 requests a minute on the free plan |
| Moving your Brave code | None: GET /res/v1/web/search with q, count, offset and freshness answers in Brave's JSON, with web.results[] | Up to 20 results a request, offset from 0 to 9 | A new client and a new parser | A new client and a new parser | A new client and a new parser | A new client and a new parser |
| Price after the free step, per 1,000 | $1 for up to 10 results through Brave's call. count=20 costs $0.0022 a call | $5 | $8 pay as you go at $0.008 a credit | $4 on Lite, $7 on Auto, $12 on Deep | $1.00 on the $50 pack of 50,000 | About $7.60 on the $19 Hobby plan of 5,000 credits |
| 10,000 searches a month | $10 the first month, paid by the free credit, then $10 a month | $45 a month: 9,000 requests past the credit at $5 per 1,000 | $72 a month at $0.008 a credit past the 1,000 free | $30 a month at $4 per 1,000 past the $10 monthly credit | About $10 a month, drawn from the $50 pack of 50,000, after the 2,500 free | $19 Hobby covers 2,500 searches; 10,000 need a larger plan |
| Reading the pages it finds | Extract API: the main text of up to 20 URLs a call, at $0.80 per 1,000 pages, from the same credit | A description and up to 5 extra excerpts with each result | Extract requests, billed in the same credits | Contents at $1 per 1,000 pages | Search results only | 1,000 pages scraped in place of 500 searches |
Why Brave users start free on SpecStream
The free credit runs your Brave code as it is
Every other free tier on this page needs a new client and a new parser. SpecStream answers Brave's call, so the change is the base address and the key.
# Before
curl -G https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/search \
-H "X-Subscription-Token: $BRAVE_API_KEY" \
--data-urlencode "q=Which US banks failed in 2026" -d count=10
# After
curl -G https://api.specstream.ai/res/v1/web/search \
-H "X-Subscription-Token: $SPECSTREAM_API_KEY" \
--data-urlencode "q=Which US banks failed in 2026" -d count=10The reply has Brave's shape: type, query, mixed and web.results[] with title, url, description, profile, meta_url and page_age when known. Every field is mapped on the Brave migration page.
No card, no attribution, no monthly reset
Brave's $5 renews each month and covers 1,000 requests, with a card on file and a credit line on your site. SpecStream's $10 comes once with a new account and no card, covers 10,000 Brave calls, and does not expire, so an eval run of 5,000 queries fits in the first day.
After the free step, a fifth of Brave's price
Brave charges $5 per 1,000 requests at every volume. SpecStream charges $1 per 1,000 Brave calls of up to 10 results, and a call with no count returns 10. A call for 11 to 20 results costs $0.0022, and a call stopped by a 429 with Retry-After charges nothing.
The most accurate web search API in the world
A free search is the same search a paying account gets: 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 SimpleQA Verified questions (978 correct), and 64.0 item F1 and 43.4 row F1 on all 200 WideSearch tasks. Every score and its method is on the benchmarks page.
Search, pages and datasets on the same credit
The $10 also runs the Extract API, which reads web pages, PDF, Word and Excel files at $0.80 per 1,000 pages, and GET /v1/web-search, which returns the answer with the page it was read from at $5 per 1,000. Deep Search returns every match on the live web as structured rows at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a row, under a maximum you approve before it runs.
Other Brave Search API alternatives with a free tier
SerpApi
250 free searches a month at 50 an hour, then $25 a month for 1,000 searches on Starter. An empty result set counts as a search. SpecStream's $10 covers 10,000 searches, and there is no plan to buy after it.
Parallel
$5 free monthly with a card on file, plus up to $80 at signup, and search from $1 per 1,000 requests. SpecStream asks for no card, and answers Brave's call where Parallel needs a new client.
Linkup
4,000 free queries, then $0.005 to $0.006 a request. A SpecStream Brave call costs $0.001 for up to 10 results.
You.com
$10 of free credit, which You.com says is 2,000 searches, then $5 per 1,000 calls. SpecStream's $10 covers 10,000 searches with no card.
How SpecStream scores
The same numbers as the benchmarks page, from the official tasks and scorers.
| SpecStream |  Parallel |  Exa |  Tavily |  Perplexity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Web researchWideSearch, GPT-5.6 Luna | 60.9 | 45.5 | 53.0 | 47.9 | 47.0 |
| Factual accuracySimpleQA Verified, GPT-5.6 Luna | 96 | 94 | 91 | 94 | 94 |
| Factual accuracySimpleQA Verified, GPT-5.6 Sol | 99 | 97 | 91 | 92 | 95 |
How to move your Brave code to the free credit
1. Sign up at specstream.ai. The account starts with $10 of credit, no card.
2. Create a key under Agents & API in the workspace, and give it a spending limit.
3. Set the base address to https://api.specstream.ai where your code has https://api.search.brave.com, and send the SpecStream key in X-Subscription-Token or as a Bearer token.
import requests
BASE = "https://api.specstream.ai" # was https://api.search.brave.com
reply = requests.get(
f"{BASE}/res/v1/web/search",
headers={"X-Subscription-Token": SPECSTREAM_KEY},
params={"q": "Which US banks failed in 2026", "count": 10},
).json()
for result in reply["web"]["results"]:
print(result["title"], result["url"], result["description"])4. Each charged reply carries the X-Balance-Cents header, the balance in cents after the call, so you see what is left of the $10.
In an MCP client, add the server https://api.specstream.ai/mcp with OAuth or the key, and call the search_web tool. The MCP docs list every client.
Frequently asked questions
Something we didn't answer? Talk to a human
Does the Brave Search API still have a free tier?
What is the best free alternative to the Brave Search API?
/res/v1/web/search call in Brave's JSON, and it scores 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 SimpleQA Verified questions. After the credit, $1 per 1,000.Why does Brave say up to $20 in free calls?
Which Brave alternatives need no credit card?
Do I have to change my code to leave Brave?
https://api.search.brave.com to https://api.specstream.ai and the key, and /res/v1/web/search answers in Brave's JSON. Moving to Tavily, Exa, Serper or Firecrawl means a new client and a new parser.Does the SpecStream free credit expire?
Does SpecStream have an MCP server?
https://api.specstream.ai/mcp over Streamable HTTP, with OAuth or an API key. Your agent searches with search_web and reads pages with read_pages, on the same $10 of credit.Sources
SpecStream wrote this page. Each rival figure comes from that company's own page, read on Nov 12, 2026.
- SpecStream pricingspecstream.ai/pricing, read Nov 12, 2026
- SpecStream for agentsspecstream.ai/agents.md, read Nov 12, 2026
- SpecStream benchmarksspecstream.ai/benchmarks, read Nov 12, 2026
- Brave Search API pricingbrave.com/search/api/, read Nov 12, 2026
- Brave, Search API plans announcementbrave.com/blog/most-powerful-search-api-for-ai/, read Nov 12, 2026
- Brave Web Search documentationapi-dashboard.search.brave.com/app/documentation/web-search/get-started, read Nov 12, 2026
- Tavily pricingtavily.com/pricing, read Nov 12, 2026
- Tavily search endpointdocs.tavily.com/documentation/api-reference/endpoint/search, read Nov 12, 2026
- Exa pricingexa.ai/pricing, read Nov 12, 2026
- Exa pricing docsexa.ai/docs/admin/pricing.md, read Nov 12, 2026
- Serperserper.dev/, read Nov 12, 2026
- Firecrawl pricingfirecrawl.dev/pricing, read Nov 12, 2026
- SerpApi pricingserpapi.com/pricing, read Nov 12, 2026
- Parallel pricingparallel.ai/pricing, read Nov 12, 2026
- Linkup pricinglinkup.so/pricing, read Nov 12, 2026
- You.com plansyou.com/plans, read Nov 12, 2026