TL;DR
- Cheapest real-time Google results: Serper, $1.00 per 1,000 on the small pack and $0.30 on the biggest.
- Cheapest if you can wait about 45 minutes: DataForSEO's standard queue at $0.60 per 1,000.
- Most expensive entry price: SerpApi at $25 per 1,000. You're paying for dozens of engines and legal cover.
- The sticker price lies. Failed requests, extra pages, search operators and credit expiry can double your real bill.
Google does not sell its search results. It never has. So an entire industry exists to rent you the view: companies that run fleets of browsers through residential proxies, solve the CAPTCHAs, parse every box on the page, and hand you clean JSON for a fraction of a cent.
The strange part is the price spread. The same Google results page, for the same query, costs anywhere from $0.30 to $25 per thousand depending on who you rent it from. That’s not a rounding error. That’s an 83× difference for what is, at the bottom, the same ten blue links.
I’ve spent fifteen years on the other side of this, writing the scrapers these companies now sell as a service. This is the price list I wish someone had handed me. Every number below was checked on the vendor’s own pricing page on November 2, 2026.
The full price table
Prices are per 1,000 Google searches, first page of results, at each provider’s smallest and largest self-serve plan.
| Provider | Smallest plan | Biggest plan | Free tier | Billing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Serper | $1.00 ($50 for 50k) | $0.30 ($3,750 for 12.5M) | 2,500 queries | Prepaid, valid 6 months |
| DataForSEO | $0.60 queue · $1.20 priority · $2.00 live | same | Trial | Pay as you go |
| HasData | $1.23 Light · $2.46 full | $0.35 Light · $0.69 full | 1,000 credits/mo | Monthly |
| Bright Data | from $1.00 | volume plans | 5,000 requests/mo | PAYG or monthly |
| Zenserp | $2.00 ($49.99 for 25k) | $0.90 ($899 for 1M) | 50/mo | Monthly |
| SearchApi | $4.00 ($40 for 10k) | $2.00 ($500 for 250k) | 100 requests | Monthly |
| Keirolabs | $5.33 (2 credits, Essential) | $1.78 (Startup) | 750 credits | Monthly or packs |
| SerpWow | $12.50 ($125 for 10k) | $3.84 ($960 for 250k) | Trial | Monthly |
| SerpApi | $25.00 ($25 for 1k) | ~$1.96 (Cloud, 54M/mo) | 250/mo | Monthly |
Want it for your exact volume? The price calculator does the multiplication for every search API we track, not just SERP scrapers.
Why the spread is so wide
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about this market: the hard part isn’t the scraping. Anyone can fetch a Google results page once. The hard part is fetching it a million times a day without getting blocked, from the right country, and parsing it correctly after Google quietly moves a div on a Tuesday.
So what you’re really buying is three things, in different ratios:
- Infrastructure at scale. Proxies, browsers, retries. Big providers amortize this across huge volumes, which is why the bottom of the table gets so cheap.
- Parser maintenance. Every SERP feature (People Also Ask, the local pack, shopping carousels, AI Overviews) is a parser someone has to keep alive. More engines and more features means more parsers means a higher price.
- Risk. Somebody is absorbing the legal and operational risk of scraping Google. Some vendors price that in explicitly.
Serper sits at one extreme: Google only, organic-first, brutally cheap. SerpApi sits at the other: dozens of engines, a parser for nearly everything, legal cover on its higher plans. Neither is wrong. They’re just different products wearing the same name.
If you only ever call engine=google and read the organic results, you are almost certainly overpaying on a premium plan. If you need Google Shopping, Maps, Scholar and YouTube from one integration, the premium is often cheaper than maintaining four integrations yourself.
What’s the cheapest SERP API?
It depends on one question: do you need the answer now?
Real time, small volume
Serper
$1.00 per 1,000 on the $50 pack, and 2,500 free queries cover a prototype. Fast, and every agent framework already has a wrapper for it.
Real time, big volume
Serper or HasData Light
Serper drops to $0.50 at 2.5M and $0.30 at 12.5M. HasData’s Light API gets to $0.35 on its largest plan.
Can wait 45 minutes
DataForSEO queue
$0.60 per 1,000 in the standard queue. This is the trick behind most rank trackers’ margins.
Many engines, one bill
SearchApi or SerpApi
SearchApi runs $4 down to $2. SerpApi starts at $25 but parses almost everything that has a search box.
How much does SerpApi cost?
SerpApi is a monthly subscription, and the per-search price falls fast as you climb:
| Plan | Searches/month | Price | Per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 1,000 | $25 | $25.00 |
| Developer | 5,000 | $75 | $15.00 |
| Production | 15,000 | $150 | $10.00 |
| Big Data | 30,000 | $275 | $9.17 |
| Searcher | 100,000 | $725 | $7.25 |
| Cloud 1M | 1,000,000 | $3,750 | $3.75 |
| Cloud 54M | 54,000,000 | $106,050 | ~$1.96 |
At the top it’s competitive. At the bottom, the entry plan costs 25× what Serper charges for a Google search. What you get for that is breadth (Google, Bing, Baidu, YouTube, Maps, Shopping, Walmart, and so on), a mature playground and docs, and the U.S. Legal Shield on higher plans. If you need that, it’s worth it. If you don’t, it’s a tax.
The fine print that moves your real price
Per-1,000 prices are the sticker. Your invoice is the sticker plus everything below. Read these before you sign anything.
Failed requests. Bright Data, SearchApi and Zenserp say they only bill successful requests. Keirolabs refunds credits automatically when its Google backend fails. If a vendor doesn’t say this anywhere, ask. A 5% failure rate you pay for is a 5% price increase.
- Page two costs money. DataForSEO charges one base price per extra 10 results. Most APIs bill page 2 as a whole second search. Need the top 50? That’s five searches.
- Search operators are a surcharge. DataForSEO charges 5× the base price for each advanced operator (
site:,intitle:,inurl:and friends). Onesite:query in the queue is $0.003, not $0.0006. - AI Overviews cost extra. Zenserp bills a result that includes the AI Overview at 3 credits. Others capture it as a separate item or not at all.
- Credits expire. Serper credits last 6 months. The 12.5M pack is only $0.30 per 1,000 if you actually use 12.5M searches in six months.
- Hourly caps. SearchApi lets you spend at most 20% of your plan’s credits per hour. Great for steady traffic, awkward for a big overnight batch.
Say you track 2,000 keywords daily, top 30 results each, with a site: check for 200 of them. On DataForSEO’s queue that’s 2,000 × 3 pages × $0.0006 = $3.60, plus 200 × 5 × $0.0006 = $0.60. That’s $4.20 a day, about $126 a month. On a “per search” API that bills each page as a search, the same job is 6,200 searches a day. The cheapest per-search plan isn’t always the cheapest plan.
Credit-based scrapers
A few general scraping APIs sell credits rather than searches, and one Google search can cost a different number of credits depending on rendering and options:
- Scrapingdog starts at $40/month for 200,000 credits.
- ScraperAPI starts at $49/month for 100,000 credits.
- Oxylabs lists Google results from $0.50 per 1,000 on smaller plans down to $0.25 above 10M, and $1.15–1.35 with JavaScript rendering.
Don’t compare these to the table above by eye. Run a test batch of 500 real queries, check how many credits disappeared, and divide. That’s your real per-1,000 price.
Is SerpApi legal? Is any of this legal?
Scraping public search results lives in a grey zone, and 2026 made it more interesting. Google sued SerpApi; the case was dismissed in July 2026 without prejudice, which means Google can refile. Reddit’s separate suit against scrapers is still pending.
Right now, the legal exposure mostly sits with the vendor, and some sell that as a feature: SerpApi’s U.S. Legal Shield, and SearchApi’s statement that it takes legal responsibility with up to $2M in coverage.
The cheapest SERP API is the one you don’t have to migrate off in a hurry.
If that risk worries you, the alternative isn’t a different scraper. It’s a search API with its own index, like Brave, Exa or Keirolabs’ own index, which sidesteps the question. Our guide to choosing a search API walks through that trade-off.
Which one should you pick?
- Prototype or small app: Serper. Cheap, fast, generous free credits.
- Rank tracking or SEO tooling at volume: DataForSEO’s queue, or HasData’s Light API.
- Many engines, Maps, Shopping, YouTube: SerpApi if budget allows, SearchApi if it doesn’t.
- Google results plus page text, answers and extraction on one key: Keirolabs. Its Google endpoint costs more per call than Serper, but the same credits cover its own index (lite search from $0.03 per 1,000), content and research endpoints.
- An LLM agent that needs page text, not links: skip SERP APIs entirely and read the best web search APIs.
Whatever you choose, wrap it in one function that returns your own result shape (title, url, snippet, position). Switching SERP providers should be a one-file change. In this market, you will switch.
FAQ
Is there a free SERP API?
Not for production. The most generous free allowances are Bright Data (5,000 requests a month), HasData (1,000 credits a month) and Serper (2,500 queries once). They’re perfect for testing and useless for a product.
Why do SERP APIs cost so different amounts?
Because you’re buying infrastructure, parser maintenance and risk in different proportions. Google-only, organic-only, queue-delivered data is cheap. Every engine, every SERP feature, real time, with legal cover is not.
Do SERP APIs return the AI Overview?
Several do. DataForSEO returns it as its own item type, and Zenserp bills it at 3 credits. Coverage changes quickly, so test with a query you know triggers one before you rely on it.
What’s the difference between a SERP API and a web search API?
A SERP API gives you Google’s page. A web search API (Brave, Exa, Tavily, Keirolabs) gives you its own results, often with page text, built for apps and LLMs. More in best SERP APIs.