Serper pricing
$1.00 to $0.30 per 1,000, and $1 on SpecStream.
Serper sells prepaid credit packs: $50 for 50,000 credits ($1.00 per 1,000) up to $3,750 for 12.5 million ($0.30 per 1,000). Credits are valid for 6 months, and a new account gets 2,500 free queries.
SpecStream is the live web data engine for teams and agents. It answers Serper's own POST /search call at $1 per 1,000 searches from the first search, with no pack to buy and credit that never expires.
New accounts get $10 of credit, no card. It covers 10,000 searches.
Every Serper price, and what SpecStream charges for the same call
| SpecStream | Serper | |
|---|---|---|
| Price per 1,000 searches | $1 for up to 10 results, from the first search, on Serper's call at https://api.specstream.ai/serper/search | Starter $50 for 50k credits ($1.00/1k), Standard $375 for 500k ($0.75/1k), Scale $1,250 for 2.5M ($0.50/1k), Ultimate $3,750 for 12.5M ($0.30/1k) |
| Smallest purchase | A $10 top-up, which covers 10,000 searches | The $50 Starter pack |
| How long the balance lasts | Credit you buy never expires | Credits are valid for 6 months |
| Volume price | A top-up of $1,000 or more adds 20% more credit: $1,000 buys $1,200, or 1,200,000 searches | The rate falls to $0.30 per 1,000 on the $3,750 pack of 12.5 million credits |
| More than 10 results | Each started block of 10 more results adds $0.0012: num=50 costs $0.0058 a call and num=100 $0.0118 | Serper's page does not price it. ColdIQ's guide reports 2 credits for a query that asks for more than 10 results |
| Free to start | $10 of credit on a new account, no card: 10,000 searches through Serper's call | 2,500 free queries, no credit card |
| When a call is charged | A call that returns no results costs nothing. A busy call answers 429 with Retry-After and is not charged, and the reply carries specstream.price_usd, the price of that call | Credits are deducted each time you receive a successful response. When the balance reaches zero, Serper stops accepting new queries |
| Speed limit | The same key and the same price for any volume. A busy call is told when to retry and charged nothing | 50 queries per second on Starter, 100 on Standard, 200 on Scale and 300 on Ultimate |
| What answers the call | The whole live web, read at the moment of the call. 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 SimpleQA Verified questions (978 correct) and 64.0 item F1 on all 200 WideSearch tasks | Google, queried live at each call. Serper caches nothing |
| The text of the pages | passages=true on GET /v1/web-search gives each source an excerpt of its page, up to about 3,500 characters. The Extract API reads up to 20 pages a call at $0.80 per 1,000 pages, and a page with no text is not charged | Google's snippet for each organic result |
| 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 query, as JSON. Your code builds the rows |
What the Serper price list means for your bill
What 100,000 searches a month cost
At 100,000 searches a month, two Starter packs cost $100 a month on Serper, the same $100 as on SpecStream. The Standard pack at $375 brings Serper to $0.75 per 1,000, but its 500,000 credits must be used within 6 months: at 60,000 searches a month, 140,000 of them expire unused.
On SpecStream you pay $1 per 1,000 as you go, and a balance left over stays. A top-up of $1,000 or more adds 20%, so $1,000 covers 1,200,000 searches with no date to spend them by.
When the $0.30 rate applies
Serper's $0.30 per 1,000 is the Ultimate pack: $3,750 paid up front for 12.5 million credits, about 2 million searches a month to use them before they expire. Under that volume the rate you pay is $0.50 to $1.00 per 1,000, and credits you do not use are lost.
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.
What Serper's call returns on SpecStream
/serper/search, /serper/news and /serper/images answer in Serper's JSON: searchParameters, answerBox when the search has an answer, and organic[] with title, link, snippet, position and date when known. gl, hl and location are accepted and echoed, and do not shape the search. The maps, places, videos, shopping, scholar, patents and autocomplete paths are not served, and knowledgeGraph, peopleAlsoAsk and relatedSearches are not returned.
Other search API prices next to Serper
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, Serper'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.
SerpApi
Monthly plans: Starter $25 for 1,000 searches, Developer $75 for 5,000, Production $150 for 15,000, up to Cloud 54M at $106,050 a month. SpecStream answers SerpApi's own search.json call at $1 per 1,000 with no monthly plan.
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.
Parallel
$1 per 1,000 requests in turbo and fast mode and $5 in basic and advanced, and a request with no mode runs advanced. SpecStream answers Parallel'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, with 1,000 free credits every month. 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 Serper calls to SpecStream
Change one line. https://api.specstream.ai/serper answers the call your code sends to https://google.serper.dev today, in Serper's JSON, so the code that reads organic[] stays as it is. Send a SpecStream key in X-API-KEY. Each call of up to 10 results costs $0.001.
# Before
curl -s https://google.serper.dev/search -H "X-API-KEY: $VENDOR_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"q": "open source vector databases", "num": 10}'
# After
curl -s https://api.specstream.ai/serper/search -H "X-API-KEY: $SPECSTREAM_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"q": "open source vector databases", "num": 10}'In Python:
import os
import requests
BASE = "https://api.specstream.ai/serper" # was https://google.serper.dev
reply = requests.post(
f"{BASE}/search",
headers={"X-API-KEY": os.environ["SPECSTREAM_API_KEY"]},
json={"q": "open source vector databases", "num": 10, "page": 1},
).json()
for result in reply["organic"]:
print(result["position"], result["title"], result["link"])
print(reply["specstream"]["price_usd"])q, num, page and tbs work as before, and credits stays 1 so code that counts it keeps working. Every field is in the Serper 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
Something we didn't answer? Talk to a human
How much does Serper cost?
Is Serper free?
Do Serper credits expire?
What does one Serper credit buy?
Is there a cheaper alternative to Serper?
POST /search at $1 per 1,000 from the first search, the price of Serper's Starter pack, with no pack to buy and no expiry. A top-up of $1,000 or more covers 1,200,000 searches.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 Serper price comes from Serper'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
- Serperserper.dev/, read Nov 12, 2026
- ColdIQ, Serper pricing in 2026coldiq.com/blog/serper-pricing, read Nov 12, 2026
- SerpApi pricingserpapi.com/pricing.md, read Nov 12, 2026
- Brave Search APIbrave.com/search/api/, read Nov 12, 2026
- Parallel search modesdocs.parallel.ai/search/modes.md, read Nov 12, 2026
- Tavily creditsdocs.tavily.com/documentation/api-credits.md, read Nov 12, 2026