TL;DR
- SerpApi costs $25 per 1,000 on Starter and about $1.96 at its biggest Cloud plan.
- Cheapest swaps for Google: Serper ($1.00 → $0.30), DataForSEO queue ($0.60), HasData Light ($1.23 → $0.35).
- Closest like-for-like in breadth and legal cover: SearchApi ($4 → $2).
- Stay on SerpApi if you need exotic engines, legal cover, or you're under ~5,000 searches a month.
SerpApi is the brand name of the SERP API world. It’s well documented, it parses almost every search engine you’ve heard of, and its playground makes the first five minutes delightful.
The next five months are where people start looking around. At 100,000 searches a month, SerpApi’s Searcher plan costs $725. The same volume of Google results costs about $75 at Serper’s 500k-pack rate, or $60 in DataForSEO’s standard queue.
That’s a 10× difference. If you only ever call engine=google, you’re paying for a lot of breadth you never use. Here are the alternatives, and the honest cases where SerpApi is still worth every cent.
SerpApi vs alternatives
| API | Per 1,000 (entry → volume) | Free | Engines | Legal cover |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SerpApi | $25 → about $1.96 | 250/mo | Dozens | U.S. Legal Shield |
| Serper | $1.00 → $0.30 | 2,500 once | Not stated | |
| DataForSEO | $0.60 queue · $1.20 priority · $2.00 live | Trial | Google, Bing and more | Not stated |
| HasData | $1.23 → $0.35 (Light) · $2.46 → $0.69 (full) | 1,000 credits/mo | Not stated | |
| Zenserp | $2.00 → $0.90 | 50/mo | Google, Bing, YouTube | Not stated |
| SearchApi | $4.00 → $2.00 | 100 | Many | Legal responsibility, up to $2M coverage |
| Bright Data | from $1.00 | 5,000/mo | All major | Enterprise terms |
| Keirolabs | $5.33 → $1.78 (2 credits per call) | 750 credits | Google, plus its own index | Not stated |
| SerpWow | $12.50 → $3.84 | Trial | Many | Not stated |
Prices were checked on each pricing page on November 2, 2026. For the details that change the real price (failed requests, extra pages, operators, credit expiry), see SERP API pricing.
What SerpApi actually costs
| 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 |
| Searcher | 100,000 | $725 | $7.25 |
| Cloud 1M | 1,000,000 | $3,750 | $3.75 |
At 100,000 Google searches a month: SerpApi Searcher is $725. Serper at its 500k-pack rate ($0.75 per 1,000) is about $75. DataForSEO’s standard queue at $0.60 is $60. Over a year, that’s roughly $7,800 you could spend on literally anything else.
The alternatives
Serper: the default swap
The obvious move for Google-only workloads. Fast, $1.00 per 1,000 on the $50 pack, down to $0.30 on the 12.5M pack. 2,500 free queries to test with.
Serper credits expire after 6 months. The $0.30 rate only applies if you actually use 12.5M searches in that window. Buy the pack you’ll burn, not the one with the prettiest per-unit price.
DataForSEO: what SEO tools run on
Live mode is $2.00 per 1,000, priority queue $1.20, standard queue $0.60 with a 45-minute target turnaround. If your job is rank tracking that runs overnight anyway, the queue is the cheapest real data in this market. Watch the extras: operators like site: cost 5× the base price.
HasData: cheap volume, two flavors
The Light API runs $1.23 per 1,000 down to $0.35. The full API, with every SERP feature parsed, is $2.46 down to $0.69. Pick Light if you only need organic results.
Zenserp: simple and cheap
$49.99 for 25,000 searches, $899 for 1M. AI Overview results cost 3 credits.
SearchApi: the closest like-for-like
The nearest match to SerpApi in breadth, at $4 per 1,000 dropping to $2. It also states it takes legal responsibility for how it collects results, with up to $2M in coverage. One catch: you can use at most 20% of your plan’s credits per hour, which can bite on big batch jobs.
Keirolabs: Google plus an index of its own
A Google SERP endpoint at 2 credits a call ($5.33 per 1,000 on Essential, $1.78 on Startup), with results in about 0.2–0.4 seconds. It’s not the cheapest Google option, but the same key covers its own index (lite search from $0.03 per 1,000), page content and answers, and credits are refunded automatically when the Google backend fails.
Bright Data: the enterprise choice
City-level targeting, billing only on successful requests, and a free tier of 5,000 requests a month.
Migrating from SerpApi
A SerpApi Google search:
curl -G "https://serpapi.com/search.json" \
-d engine=google --data-urlencode "q=best running shoes" \
-d gl=us -d hl=en -d api_key=$SERPAPI_KEYThe same on Serper:
curl https://google.serper.dev/search \
-H "X-API-KEY: $SERPER_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"q": "best running shoes", "gl": "us", "hl": "en"}'Field mapping
| SerpApi | Serper |
|---|---|
organic_results[].link | organic[].link |
organic_results[].snippet | organic[].snippet |
organic_results[].position | organic[].position |
related_questions | peopleAlsoAsk |
related_searches | relatedSearches |
Map these once, in one small adapter function, and keep your app on your own result shape. Then run both providers side by side on a week of real queries before you cancel anything.
SerpApi vs the Google API
Google’s own Custom Search JSON API was cheaper ($5 per 1,000 after 100 free a day), but it’s closed to new customers and shuts down on January 1, 2027. It’s not an alternative anymore.
When to stay on SerpApi
Breadth and legal cover are real products. If you use them, the premium isn’t a tax.
- You need Baidu, Naver, Yandex, Walmart, Home Depot or another engine the cheaper APIs don’t parse.
- Legal cover matters to your company’s lawyers more than the price difference.
- You’re under about 5,000 searches a month and the difference is a few dollars.
Or skip scraped Google entirely
If an LLM reads the results, you may not need Google’s page at all. APIs with their own index, like Brave, Exa and Keirolabs, avoid the scraping question and often return page text. See best web search APIs, or price everything in the calculator.