Brave Search API discontinued its card-free free tier. The old plan gave developers 2,000 free queries per month with no credit card required; that tier is gone. Every current Brave plan now requires a credit card on file, includes $5 in free monthly credits (roughly 1,000 Search queries), and bills $5 per 1,000 requests beyond that. If a side project, prototype, or agent pipeline was living on those 2,000 card-free queries, it needs a new plan.
What changed, exactly
- The 2,000 free queries per month, no-card tier is discontinued.
- All plans now require a credit card, including to use the included credits.
- Every plan includes $5 in free monthly credits, which covers about 1,000 Search queries.
- Search plan: $5 per 1,000 requests, up to 50 queries per second.
- Answers plan: $4 per 1,000 requests plus $5 per million tokens, at 2 queries per second.
Who this hits hardest: hobby projects and early prototypes that never wanted a card on file, hackathon and student builds, and agent developers who wired Brave in as the free web-search tool behind a LangChain or MCP setup. A card-gated $5 monthly credit is not the same thing as a genuinely free tier — signup friction matters when the whole point is a weekend experiment.
Why Brave dropped the free tier
Brave runs its own independent search index. That index costs real money to crawl, store, and serve. Unlike providers that proxy Google results, Brave is paying for the entire stack. A free tier at scale was unsustainable. This is a legitimate business decision, not a bait-and-switch — and the included monthly credits soften the landing for very small workloads, provided you will add a card.
What Brave still does well
Brave has the only major independent search index outside of Google and Bing. If you need results that are not just Google repackaged, Brave is genuinely unique. Their Goggles feature lets you re-rank results with custom rulesets. For privacy-focused applications, Brave does not track users or personalize results. These are real advantages that no proxy-based API can match, and nothing below replicates them.
The alternatives, ranked
- Scavio — $30/mo for 7,000 credits works out to roughly $4.30 per 1,000 Google searches, cheaper per-1k than Brave's $5. New accounts get 50 free signup credits with no credit card required, which is enough to test a migration end to end. A
POST /api/v2/googlecall returns structuredorganic_results[](title, link, snippet) plus knowledge graph data, People Also Ask, and AI overviews — more SERP structure than Brave exposes. The same key also covers YouTube, Reddit, Amazon, and more. The honest tradeoff: Scavio returns Google results, not an independent index. If independence from Google is the reason you chose Brave, Scavio does not replace that. - Serper — 2,500 free queries to start, then around $50 for 50K. Google results only. Fast and reliable, with the largest free allotment on this list, but no multi-platform support and minimal SERP-feature parsing.
- Google Programmable Search (CSE) — 100 free queries per day, directly from Google. Very limited volume and a CX ID setup that is painful to configure, but for tiny projects the daily free quota is hard to beat.
- SerpAPI — $75/mo for 5,000 searches, which is the most expensive per-1k option here. Broad platform support and mature docs. Currently facing litigation from Google, which is a real procurement risk in mid-2026.
- Staying on Brave — if the independent index or Goggles re-ranking is a hard requirement, $5 per 1,000 is fair pricing for something nobody else sells, and the included $5 monthly credit covers workloads up to about 1,000 queries a month on its own.
Migrating from Brave to Scavio
The response shapes differ, but the core fields map one to one:
| Brave (web search) | Scavio (/api/v2/google) |
|---|---|
web.results[].title | organic_results[].title |
web.results[].url | organic_results[].link |
web.results[].description | organic_results[].snippet |
Scavio additionally returns knowledge graph, People Also Ask, and AI overview blocks that have no Brave equivalent. A minimal raw-HTTP migration:
import requests, os
# Before: Brave Search API ($5/1K, card on file required)
# resp = requests.get('https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/search',
# headers={'X-Subscription-Token': os.environ['BRAVE_KEY']},
# params={'q': 'best crm for startups 2026'})
# results = resp.json()['web']['results'] # title / url / description
# After: Scavio (50 free signup credits, no card)
resp = requests.post('https://api.scavio.dev/api/v2/google',
headers={'x-api-key': os.environ['SCAVIO_API_KEY']},
json={'query': 'best crm for startups 2026'})
results = resp.json().get('organic_results', [])
for r in results[:5]:
print(f"{r['title']} -- {r['link']}")Both official SDKs handle auth, retries, and per-platform quirks:
pip install scavio # Python
npm i scavio # JavaScript / TypeScriptThe 50 free signup credits are enough to validate result quality and the field mapping before any payment. Full endpoint reference: scavio.dev/docs/search-api.
The honest tradeoff matrix
If you need an independent index and Goggles re-ranking, Brave is still the only game in town and $5 per 1,000 is fair pricing for that. If you need card-free prototyping, Scavio (50 free signup credits) or Serper (2,500 free queries) are the realistic starting points. If you need multi-platform search — Brave only ever searched its own web index — Scavio covers Google, YouTube, Reddit, and Amazon under one API key, so an agent can pull web SERPs, Reddit opinions, and Amazon product data without a second vendor. If you need a trickle of free volume forever, Google CSE's 100 free queries per day works for tiny projects. There is no single best answer. Pick based on what the project actually needs.
What to do this week
- Audit your current Brave API usage volume.
- Under ~1,000 queries/mo and fine with a card on file: Brave's included $5 monthly credit already covers you — no migration needed.
- Want no card at all: use Scavio's 50 free signup credits to validate a migration, or Serper's 2,500 free queries for a longer evaluation.
- Independent index or Goggles a hard requirement: stay on Brave and budget $5 per 1,000.
- Multi-platform on the roadmap: migrate to Scavio and consolidate vendors.
The card-free free tier era for search APIs is ending across the industry, and Brave was one of the last holdouts. Plan the budget accordingly. For a deeper side-by-side, see Brave Search API alternatives and compare Scavio vs alternatives.