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Brave Search API pricing

$5 per 1,000 requests, and $1 on SpecStream.

Brave charges $5 per 1,000 requests on its Search plan and $4 per 1,000 on Answers, plus $5 per million input and output tokens. Each plan includes $5 in free credits a month, and Brave asks for a credit card.

SpecStream is the live web data engine for teams and agents. It answers Brave's own /res/v1/web/search call at $1 per 1,000 searches, returns the answer with its page at $5, and reads pages at $0.80 per 1,000.

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New accounts get $10 of credit, no card. It covers 10,000 searches.

Every Brave Search API price, and what SpecStream charges for the same job

SpecStreamBrave Search API
Web search, per 1,000 calls$1 per 1,000 searches of up to 10 results on Brave's own call, https://api.specstream.ai/res/v1/web/search. $5 per 1,000 on /v1/web-search with the answer$5 per 1,000 requests on the Search plan. Each API call counts as one request
Results in one callUp to 20 on Brave's call. Up to 10 cost $0.001 and 11 to 20 cost $0.0022. A call with no count returns 10 at $0.001count up to 20, default 20, for the same $0.005. The number returned can be less than count
Page text for a modelpassages=true adds the text of the top pages to the same $0.001 search. The Extract API reads up to 20 URLs a call at $0.80 per 1,000 pages, and a page with no text is not chargedLLM context, results optimized for models and agents, comes with the Search plan at $5 per 1,000 requests
A cited answer$5 per 1,000 searches, with no token charge. The reply carries answer with its page and read time, rows with the facts asked for, and the results readAnswers plan: $4 per 1,000 requests plus $5 per million input and output tokens, 2 queries per second
Free use$10 of credit on a new account, no card: 10,000 searches through Brave's call, 2,000 with the answer, or 12,500 pages$5 in free credits every month on each plan, applied automatically. Brave asks for a credit card to prevent abuse. Its Search API page also says up to $20 in free calls every month
How you payA balance you top up. Credit you buy never expires, and each reply carries price_usd, the price of that callPrepaid credits, no subscription. You buy credits upfront and draw them down
A call that returns nothingCosts nothing. A busy call answers 429 with Retry-After and is not chargedEach API call counts as one request
Speed limitNo limit per key and no daily limit50 queries per second on Search, 2 on Answers
Zero data retentionOn any API key: set zero_retention and a search keeps no request text and no answer after the replyFull-funnel Zero Data Retention on the Enterprise plan, by contact
Structured rowsDeep Search: one request in plain words returns every match as a row, with a source URL and read time on every value, at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a rowSearch results and answers. Your code finds the records and builds the rows

What the Brave price list means for your bill

What 100,000 searches a month cost

At 100,000 searches a month, the Brave Search plan costs $500, or $495 after its $5 monthly credit. The same calls cost $100 on SpecStream through Brave's own call shape, and $500 with the answer written for you.

Brave returns 20 results by default for its $0.005. When your code asks for 20, SpecStream charges $0.0022 a call, $220 a month for 100,000 searches. When it asks for 10 or sends no count, the call is $0.001.

An answer with no token bill

Brave's Answers plan adds $5 per million input and output tokens to its $4 per 1,000 requests. An answer that reads 3,000 tokens and writes 300 costs $0.004 plus $0.0165 in tokens, $0.0205 in all, or $2,050 for 100,000 answers.

A SpecStream answer costs $0.005 whatever the length of the pages read, $500 for 100,000. The reply carries answer with the page it was read from and its read time in seen_at. When the results disagree, answer is null and every value found stays in rows with its page.

The most accurate web search API

The SpecStream Search API scores 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 official SimpleQA Verified questions, 978 of them correct, and 64.0 item F1 and 43.4 row F1 on all 200 official WideSearch tasks. Every score and its method are on the benchmarks page.

Costs that are not on the price list

On Brave each API call counts as one request, so a call that finds nothing is billed as one that finds 20. Zero data retention comes with Enterprise, and the Answers plan stops at 2 queries per second.

On SpecStream a search that returns no results costs nothing, a busy call is not charged, and an Idempotency-Key header makes a retried call charge once. Zero retention is a setting on any key, and Deep Search quotes the most a run can cost before it starts.

Other search API prices next to Brave

SpecStream

The live web data engine for teams and agents. The Search API costs $1 per 1,000 searches of up to 10 results on the fast tier and every drop-in address, and $5 with the answer. The Extract API reads pages at $0.80 per 1,000, and Deep Search delivers full datasets at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a row. New accounts get $10 of credit, no card.

Parallel

Search costs $1 per 1,000 requests in turbo and fast mode and $5 in basic and advanced, and a request with no mode runs advanced. Results past the first 10 cost $1 per 1,000. SpecStream answers Parallel's own call at $1 per 1,000 in every mode but advanced.

Exa

Search costs $4 per 1,000 requests on lite and $7 on auto and fast, and page contents cost $1 per 1,000 pages. SpecStream answers Exa's own call at $1 per 1,000 and reads pages at $0.80 per 1,000.

Tavily

Pay as you go is $0.008 per credit. A basic search costs 1 credit and an advanced search 2, so 1,000 searches cost $8 to $16, with 1,000 free credits every month. SpecStream answers Tavily's own call at $1 per 1,000.

Serper

Google results sold in credit packs: 50k credits cost $1.00 per 1,000, and credits are valid for 6 months. SpecStream costs the same $1 per 1,000 from the first search, with no pack to buy and credit that never expires.

How SpecStream scores

The same numbers as the benchmarks page, from the official tasks and scorers.

SpecStreamParallelExaTavilyPerplexity
Web researchWideSearch, GPT-5.6 Luna60.945.553.047.947.0
Factual accuracySimpleQA Verified, GPT-5.6 Luna9694919494
Factual accuracySimpleQA Verified, GPT-5.6 Sol9997919295

How to move your Brave calls to SpecStream

Change one line. https://api.specstream.ai/res/v1/web/search answers the call your code sends to https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/search today, in Brave's JSON, so your parser stays as it is. Send a SpecStream key in X-Subscription-Token. Each call of up to 10 results costs $0.001.

# Before
curl -s -G https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/search -H "X-Subscription-Token: $VENDOR_API_KEY" --data-urlencode "q=$QUERY" --data-urlencode "count=10"

# After
curl -s -G https://api.specstream.ai/res/v1/web/search -H "X-Subscription-Token: $SPECSTREAM_API_KEY" --data-urlencode "q=$QUERY" --data-urlencode "count=10"

q, count, offset and freshness work as before, and the reply keeps web.results[] with title, url and description. Every parameter and reply field is in the Brave migration guide.

For the answer in place of the Answers plan, call SpecStream's own Search API at $5 per 1,000: GET https://api.specstream.ai/v1/web-search with Authorization: Bearer <key>, and the question in q in everyday words.

curl -G https://api.specstream.ai/v1/web-search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPECSTREAM_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "q=Who leads engineering at Mistral AI, and when did they join?" \
  --data-urlencode "passages=true"

On MCP, your agent calls search_web with {"q": ...} and read_pages with {"urls": [...]} at https://api.specstream.ai/mcp. The SDKs call it web_search(q=...) in Python and webSearch({ q }) in TypeScript.

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Frequently asked questions

Something we didn't answer? Talk to a human

How much does the Brave Search API cost?
The Search plan costs $5 per 1,000 requests and the Answers plan $4 per 1,000 requests plus $5 per million input and output tokens. Spellcheck and Autosuggest cost $5 per 10,000 requests, and Enterprise is priced by contact.
Is the Brave Search API free?
No plan is free. Each plan includes $5 in free credits every month, about 1,000 Search requests, and Brave asks for a credit card to prevent abuse. SpecStream gives a new account $10 of credit with no card, which covers 10,000 searches through Brave's own call.
How much does a Brave Answers call cost?
$0.004 a request plus $5 per million input and output tokens. An answer that reads 3,000 tokens and writes 300 costs $0.0205. A SpecStream answer costs $0.005 with no token charge, with the page it was read from and its read time.
Does Brave charge more for 20 results?
No. Each API call counts as one request, and count goes up to 20 for the same $0.005. On SpecStream a call of up to 10 results costs $0.001 and a call of 11 to 20 costs $0.0022, so 20 results still cost less than half.
Is there a cheaper alternative to the Brave Search API?
Yes. SpecStream answers Brave's own /res/v1/web/search call at $1 per 1,000 searches of up to 10 results, a fifth of Brave's $5, in Brave's JSON. The change is the host and the key in X-Subscription-Token.
Does the Brave Search API offer zero data retention?
On the Enterprise plan, by contact. On SpecStream zero retention is a setting on any API key: a search made with it keeps no request text and no answer after the reply.
Does SpecStream have an API and an MCP server?
Yes. The Search API is GET https://api.specstream.ai/v1/web-search at $5 per 1,000 searches, or $1 with speed=fast, and the MCP server is at https://api.specstream.ai/mcp over Streamable HTTP, with OAuth or an API key.

Sources

SpecStream wrote this page. Each Brave price comes from Brave's own Search API page and pricing docs, read on Nov 12, 2026.

  1. SpecStream pricingspecstream.ai/pricing, read Nov 12, 2026
  2. SpecStream for agentsspecstream.ai/agents.md, read Nov 12, 2026
  3. SpecStream benchmarksspecstream.ai/benchmarks, read Nov 12, 2026
  4. Brave Search APIbrave.com/search/api/, read Nov 12, 2026
  5. Brave Search API pricing docsapi-dashboard.search.brave.com/documentation/pricing, read Nov 12, 2026
  6. Brave Web Search docsapi-dashboard.search.brave.com/app/documentation/web-search/get-started, read Nov 12, 2026
  7. Brave Search API on AWS Marketplaceaws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-qjlabherxghtq, read Nov 12, 2026
  8. Parallel search modesdocs.parallel.ai/search/modes.md, read Nov 12, 2026
  9. Parallel pricing docsdocs.parallel.ai/getting-started/pricing.md, read Nov 12, 2026
  10. Exa pricingexa.ai/docs/admin/pricing.md, read Nov 12, 2026
  11. Tavily creditsdocs.tavily.com/documentation/api-credits.md, read Nov 12, 2026
  12. Serperserper.dev/, read Nov 12, 2026