Budget Search APIs Under $10/Month 2026

For hobbyist agents and side projects, free tiers cover most needs: Tavily (1,000/month), Exa (1,000/month), Scavio (250/month), SerpAPI (250/month), and Brave Search (~1,000/month). The cheapest paid options are DataForSEO at $0.0006/query (queue mode) and Scavio at $0.005/query on-demand with no subscription required.

Free tier comparison

• Tavily: 1,000 credits/month. Summarized search results. Good for Q&A grounding. No credit card required.
• Exa: 1,000 requests/month. Neural/semantic search. Best for concept-similarity discovery. Startup/edu grants available ($1K credits).
• Scavio: 250 credits/month. Structured JSON from Google, Reddit, YouTube, Amazon, Walmart, TikTok. Multi-platform in one API.
• SerpAPI: 250 searches/month. Mature SERP scraping. Google v SerpAPI lawsuit pending.
• Brave Search: $5 free monthly credits (~1,000 queries at $0.005/query). Raw search results.

Cost per 1,000 queries

Provider          | Per 1K queries | Monthly plan
DataForSEO queue  | $0.60          | Pay-as-you-go ($50 min deposit)
DataForSEO live   | $2.00          | Pay-as-you-go ($50 min deposit)
Scavio on-demand  | $5.00          | No minimum, no subscription
Brave Search      | $5.00          | $5 free monthly credits
Exa search        | $7.00          | 1K free/mo, then pay-as-you-go
Tavily            | $8.00          | 1K free/mo, then $0.008/credit
SerpAPI           | $25.00         | $25/mo for 1K searches
Serper            | varies         | Community reports $0.30-1.00/1K

Decision framework

Under 250 queries/month: use any free tier. 250-1,000/month: Tavily free or Brave free covers it. 1,000-5,000/month: Scavio at $30/month (7K credits) or DataForSEO pay-as-you-go ($3-10 depending on mode). Above 5,000/month: DataForSEO queue ($3/5K) for batch, Scavio $30/mo (7K) for real-time multi-platform.

Reddit mentions: NineLayer at ~$5/month

A Reddit user in r/AI_Agents mentioned NineLayer Pro at approximately $5/month with server-side content chunking for agents. Limited public pricing data available as of May 2026, but worth watching as a budget option for hobbyist agent builders.

What to optimize for at budget scale

At low volumes, per-query cost matters less than: (1) response quality (does the API return useful structured data or just summaries), (2) platform coverage (do you need Reddit, Amazon, or just Google), (3) latency (real-time agents cannot wait for batch queue results), and (4) free tier limits (whether you hit the wall mid-month).