You.com Research API alternative in 2026

What one report costs

You.com bills each Research call by its research_effort: $12 per 1,000 calls on lite, $50 on standard, $100 on deep, $450 on exhaustive and $1,200 on frontier. A SpecStream report costs 10¢ on quick, 30¢ on standard and $1.00 on deep. The price is taken from your balance once, when the report is delivered, and the reply to your request shows it as price_usd. A cancelled report is not charged.

The search bill beside the report

A research product is rarely the only call an agent makes. You.com's Web Search API costs $5 per 1,000 calls. SpecStream answers that same call, in the same JSON, at $1 per 1,000 searches of up to 10 results. Each search saves 0.4¢, so from 63 searches for each standard report the SpecStream bill is the lower one, even with the report at 30¢ against 5¢.

One month of 200,000 searches, 100,000 pages and 1,000 standard reports costs $1,150 on You.com: $1,000 of search, $100 of pages and $50 of research. On SpecStream it costs $580: $200 of search, $80 of pages and $300 of reports. See the pricing page.

The passage behind each cited sentence

You.com's answer carries inline citations that point to a sources array of URLs, titles and snippets, and its guide asks you to build a step that follows citation URLs for legal, financial or medical use. A SpecStream report returns report.citations: for each cited sentence, the page read in that run, the time it was read and the passage. Your check reads one field of the reply.

No connection to hold open

A synchronous You.com request holds the connection for the full run, so its docs tell you to set your HTTP timeout above 120 seconds for deep and 300 seconds for exhaustive, or to send background: true. Every SpecStream report starts the same way: 202 at once with an id. You read it when status is completed, follow the server-sent events and resume with Last-Event-ID, or receive a webhook. An Idempotency-Key header makes a retry return the same report.

A table when the answer is a list

A Research call returns one answer. When the job is every company, person or product that meets your conditions, Deep Search returns each match as its own row with the facts you named, at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a delivered row, under a maximum you approve before the run. On the same key, the Search API scores 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 SimpleQA Verified questions and 64.0 item F1 on all 200 WideSearch tasks (benchmarks).

Parallel Task API

Research runs priced per 1,000 by processor: $5 on lite, $300 on ultra, which takes 5 to 25 minutes, and $2,400 on ultra8x. One charge per run, whatever the output fields. A SpecStream standard report costs the same 30¢ as one ultra run and takes about four minutes.

Tavily Research

A research endpoint billed in credits at $0.008 each on pay as you go: 4 to 110 credits a request on mini and 15 to 250 on pro, so one request costs 3¢ to 88¢ or 12¢ to $2.00. A SpecStream report has one price for its depth, shown in the reply to the request.

Exa deep search and Exa Agent

Exa's deep search type costs $12 per 1,000 requests and returns in 4 to 15 seconds. Exa Agent runs longer research at $0.012 to $1.00 a request at a fixed effort. SpecStream answers Exa's search call at https://api.specstream.ai/exa for $1 per 1,000 searches, with reports on the same key. The Exa Research API comparison has each number.

Perplexity Agent API

Perplexity bills research by the token and the tool call, with web search at $2.50 per 1,000 invocations, and its pricing guide says the cost of an effort level varies with the model, the tokens and the tool calls. A SpecStream report costs 10¢, 30¢ or $1.00, known before it starts. The deep research API comparison sets these side by side.