SerpApi pricing
$25 to $1.96 per 1,000, and $1 on SpecStream.
SerpApi sells monthly plans: $25 for 1,000 searches on Starter, $75 for 5,000 on Developer, $150 for 15,000 on Production, up to $106,050 for 54 million. The Free plan gives 250 searches a month.
SpecStream is the live web data engine for teams and agents. It answers SerpApi's own search.json call with engine=google at $1 per 1,000 searches, with no monthly plan and credit that never expires.
New accounts get $10 of credit, no card. It covers 10,000 searches.
Every SerpApi plan, and what SpecStream charges for the same searches
| SpecStream | SerpApi | |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 searches a month | $1 | Starter, $25 a month: $25 per 1,000 |
| 5,000 searches a month | $5 | Developer, $75 a month: $15 per 1,000 |
| 15,000 searches a month | $15 | Production, $150 a month: $10 per 1,000 |
| 30,000 searches a month | $30 | Big Data, $275 a month: about $9.17 per 1,000 |
| 100,000 searches a month | $100 | Searcher, $725 a month: $7.25 per 1,000 |
| 500,000 searches a month | $500 | Infrastructure, $2,750 a month: $5.50 per 1,000 |
| 1,000,000 searches a month | $1,000, or about $833 when paid as top-ups of $1,000 or more, which add 20% more credit | Cloud 1M, $3,750 a month: $3.75 per 1,000 |
| Free to start | $10 of credit on a new account, no card: 10,000 searches through SerpApi's call | Free plan: 250 searches a month, 50 an hour |
| When the searches run out | Calls spend from your balance. Credit you buy never expires | Automatic Early Renewal starts a new plan period once you have used all your searches |
| Faster replies | Every SerpApi call runs the fast search at the same $1 per 1,000 | Ludicrous Speed costs 2× the base price and Ludicrous Speed Max 4× |
| Hourly limit | None set by plan. A busy call answers 429 with Retry-After and is not charged | Guaranteed searches an hour: 200 on Starter, 1,000 on Developer, 3,000 on Production, 110,000 on Cloud 1M |
| Zero retention | zero_retention on any key: a search keeps no request text and no answer after the reply | ZeroTrace mode, which keeps no search parameters, queries or results, from the Cloud 1M plan at $3,750 a month |
| What is counted | A call that returns no results costs nothing, and the reply's price_usd is what the call cost | Only successful searches. A reply with 100 results or with none counts as 1 search |
| Search engines | engine=google, google_news and google_images, and bing_images, in SerpApi's JSON. Other engines answer 400 | Google and many other engines and result types, each its own engine |
| Structured rows | Deep 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 row | One results page per call, with serpapi_pagination for the next one |
What the SerpApi price list means for your bill
You pay for the plan, not for the searches
A plan is a monthly count of searches. A month that uses 6,000 searches needs Production at $150, because Developer stops at 5,000; on SpecStream the same month costs $6. A month that uses fewer searches than the plan holds costs the full plan.
When a plan runs out, Automatic Early Renewal starts the next period and charges the plan again. There is no rate for a single extra search.
Speed doubles the price
Ludicrous Speed doubles the price of every plan and Ludicrous Speed Max quadruples it, so 15,000 searches on Production cost $300 or $600 a month. Every SerpApi call on SpecStream runs the fast search at $1 per 1,000, $15 for the same 15,000.
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. SerpApi's own post of Oct 16, 2026 reports 97.6% on SimpleQA Verified, 937 of the 960 questions it kept. Every score and its method are on the benchmarks page.
What SerpApi's call returns on SpecStream
GET /serpapi/search.json?engine=google answers in SerpApi's JSON: search_metadata, search_parameters, organic_results[] with position, title, link, displayed_link, snippet and date when the page has one, and serpapi_pagination.next on our host. Answer boxes, knowledge graphs, related questions, local results and top stories are not returned.
Other search API prices next to SerpApi
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, SerpApi's among them, 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.
Serper
Google results in prepaid credit packs, from 50k credits at $1.00 per 1,000 to 12.5M at $0.30, and credits are valid for 6 months. SpecStream answers Serper's own call at $1 per 1,000 with no pack and no expiry.
SearchApi
Monthly plans: the Developer plan is $40 a month for 10,000 searches, $4 per 1,000, and only successful searches with a 200 status code are charged. SpecStream answers SearchApi's own call at $1 per 1,000.
Brave Search API
$5 per 1,000 requests on the Search plan, with $5 in free credits every month. SpecStream answers Brave's own call at $1 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. SpecStream answers Tavily's own call at $1 per 1,000.
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 SerpApi calls to SpecStream
Change one line. https://api.specstream.ai/serpapi/search.json answers the call your code sends to https://serpapi.com/search.json today, in SerpApi's JSON, so your parser stays as it is. Send a SpecStream key as api_key. Each call of up to 10 results costs $0.001.
# Before
curl "https://serpapi.com/search.json?engine=google&q=$QUERY&num=10&api_key=$VENDOR_API_KEY"
# After
curl "https://api.specstream.ai/serpapi/search.json?engine=google&q=$QUERY&num=10&api_key=$SPECSTREAM_API_KEY"With serpapi-python, set client.BASE_DOMAIN:
import os
import serpapi
client = serpapi.Client(api_key=os.environ["SPECSTREAM_API_KEY"])
client.BASE_DOMAIN = "https://api.specstream.ai/serpapi" # was https://serpapi.com
results = client.search({"engine": "google", "q": "open source vector databases", "num": 10})
for result in results["organic_results"]:
print(result["position"], result["title"], result["link"])q, num, start and tbs keep their meaning. Every parameter and reply field is in the SerpApi migration guide.
On MCP, your agent calls search_web with {"q": ...} and read_pages with {"urls": [...]} at https://api.specstream.ai/mcp.
Frequently asked questions
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How much does SerpApi cost?
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What happens when my SerpApi searches run out?
Does SerpApi charge for failed searches?
429 with no charge.Is there a cheaper alternative to SerpApi?
search.json call with engine=google at $1 per 1,000 searches, in SerpApi's JSON. The change is the host and the api_key.Does SpecStream have an API and an MCP server?
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 SerpApi price comes from SerpApi's own pricing 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
- SerpApi pricingserpapi.com/pricing, read Nov 12, 2026
- SerpApi on SimpleQA Verifiedserpapi.com/blog/serpapi-achieves-97-6-accuracy-on-simpleqa-verified/, read Nov 12, 2026
- Serperserper.dev/, read Nov 12, 2026
- SearchApi pricingsearchapi.io/pricing, read Nov 12, 2026
- Brave Search APIbrave.com/search/api/, read Nov 12, 2026
- Tavily creditsdocs.tavily.com/documentation/api-credits.md, read Nov 12, 2026