TL;DR
- Tavily costs $8 per 1,000 basic searches pay-as-you-go ($5 on Growth). Advanced costs double.
- Cheapest: Keirolabs lite ($0.10) and Parallel fast ($1). Best for RAG: Exa. Best public SimpleQA: Keirolabs deep (96.5%) and You.com (96.11%).
- Watch
auto_parameters: Tavily may silently switch you to advanced search at 2 credits. - Tavily scores 93.3% on SimpleQA in its own test and 88.53% in You.com's public one.
Tavily got a lot of developers through their first AI agent. It was one of the first search APIs built for LLMs rather than people, it showed up in every LangChain tutorial, and it just worked.
Then the agent went to production, made a few hundred thousand searches, and someone opened the invoice.
That’s usually how people end up reading a post like this. Tavily isn’t bad. But the market around it has changed a lot, and at $8 per 1,000 pay-as-you-go it’s now one of the pricier ways to give an agent eyes. Here’s what else is out there, what each is actually good at, and how to switch without rewriting your agent.
Tavily vs the alternatives
| API | Price per 1,000 searches | Free tier | Own index? | SimpleQA (who measured) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tavily | $8 basic · $16 advanced ($5 / $10 on Growth) | 1,000 credits/mo | No | 93.3% (Tavily) · 88.53% (You.com) |
| Keirolabs | $0.10 lite ($0.03 on Startup) | 750 credits | Yes | 96.5% deep · 92.0% lite + crawl (Keirolabs, public) |
| Parallel | $1 fast/turbo · $5 basic/advanced | 5,000 requests/mo | Yes | 94.87% basic (You.com) |
| Perplexity Search | $1 fast · $5 standard | None listed | Yes | 85.92% (Tavily) |
| Exa | $4 lite · $7 auto · $12 deep | $10 credits/mo | Yes | 95.40% with text (You.com) |
| Brave | $5 | $5 credits/mo | Yes | 76.05% (Tavily) · 87% (Parallel) |
| You.com | $5 | $10 credit (about 2,000 searches) | Mixed | 96.11% (You.com, public) |
| Linkup | $5 standard · $50 deep | $20 topped up monthly | No | 91.0 F-score deep (Linkup, public) |
| Firecrawl Search | about $1.50–7.60 (2 credits per 10 results) | Credits | No | 94.7% (Firecrawl) |
Prices were checked on each vendor’s pricing page on November 2, 2026. Every SimpleQA claim links to its source in our SimpleQA table.
Why people leave Tavily
1. The bill
At $8 per 1,000 pay-as-you-go, an agent that averages ten searches per task costs eight cents per task in search alone. Run that 100,000 times a month and you’re at $8,000. The same volume on Parallel fast is $1,000; on Keirolabs lite, $100.
The auto_parameters trap. With auto_parameters on, Tavily’s docs say it may switch search_depth to advanced, which costs 2 credits instead of 1. If your bill looks double what you expected, this is the first place to look. Set search_depth="basic" explicitly unless you really want advanced.
2. No index of its own
Tavily aggregates results from elsewhere. Exa, Parallel, Brave, Perplexity and Keirolabs run their own indexes. That matters for two reasons: they control ranking and freshness end to end, and nobody upstream can change the terms on them.
3. Accuracy depends on who runs the test
Tavily’s own SimpleQA run gives 93.3%. You.com’s public harness gives Tavily 88.53%. Neither is “wrong”. But it does mean Tavily’s headline number isn’t the one you’ll necessarily see.
Every vendor wins its own benchmark. The interesting numbers are the ones a competitor published.
The alternatives, one by one
Exa: better sources for RAG
Exa is the most different from Tavily. Its index is neural, built on embeddings, so it’s strong at “find pages like this” and fuzzy topic queries where keywords fail. Lite is $4, auto $7, deep $12 per 1,000, plus $1 per 1,000 pages for page text. In You.com’s public run, Exa with text scored 95.40%, above Tavily’s 88.53% in the same harness.
Pick it if your RAG answers are only as good as the sources, and you want better sources.
Parallel: the price-performance pick
Parallel returns ranked, compressed excerpts instead of whole pages, so your model reads fewer tokens. Fast and turbo are $1 per 1,000, basic and advanced $5. Basic scored 94.87% in You.com’s public run. Its free tier, 5,000 requests a month, is the most generous here.
Pick it if your agent runs in loops and token bills scare you more than search bills.
Keirolabs: the cheapest by a mile
$0.10 per 1,000 lite searches on Essential, $0.03 on Startup, from its own index. That’s 80× under Tavily’s pay-as-you-go price. One key also covers fast search, page content, answers, a deep research mode and a Google SERP endpoint, and there’s an MCP server for Claude Code and Cursor. Its SimpleQA runs are public: deep found the answer for 96.5% of 200 questions (repo), and lite plus an open crawl recipe for 92.0% of 500 (repo).
Pick it if you make a lot of calls and cost per call decides it.
You.com: accuracy you can audit
You.com published its benchmark harness with its results and its competitors’ in one public repo. Its search scored 96.11%, and the same repo runs Exa, Parallel and Tavily through the identical harness. $5 per 1,000.
Pick it if you need to defend your choice with numbers someone else can rerun.
Linkup: search plus sourced answers
Standard search at $5 per 1,000, deep at $50, plus sourced-answer modes. Its SimpleQA eval (91.0 F-score, deep) is public.
Brave: the independent index
Brave’s raw search scores lower in other vendors’ SimpleQA runs (76.05% in Tavily’s, 87% in Parallel’s), but it’s the closest thing to a traditional search engine you can rent. Good for apps where people read the results. How to get a key.
Perplexity Search: page text, no tokens
Ranked results with page text in the snippet, $5 per 1,000 or $1 in fast mode, and no token billing. Pricing explained.
Firecrawl: search and scrape in one
Firecrawl is a crawler company first. Search costs 2 credits per 10 results, so your price depends on your plan. The upside: search results and scraped pages in one call.
Is Tavily better than Exa?
They solve slightly different problems. Tavily is quick to wire into an agent and can return an answer directly. Exa’s index tends to find better sources for exploratory and “similar to” queries. In You.com’s public benchmark, Exa with text scored 95.40% against Tavily’s 88.53%, and Exa lite is cheaper per search ($4 vs $8). Run your own queries before deciding.
Switching from Tavily
A Tavily search:
curl https://api.tavily.com/search \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $TAVILY_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"query": "latest rust release", "search_depth": "basic", "max_results": 5}'The same search on Exa, with page text:
curl https://api.exa.ai/search \
-H "x-api-key: $EXA_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"query": "latest rust release", "type": "auto", "numResults": 5, "contents": {"text": true}}'The mapping
| Tavily | Exa | Parallel |
|---|---|---|
search_depth: basic | type: lite or auto | fast or basic |
search_depth: advanced | type: deep | advanced |
max_results | numResults | result count |
include_raw_content | contents: {text: true} | excerpts by default |
If you use LangChain or a similar framework, most of these have a tool or retriever integration, so the switch is often one import. Keep your own search() wrapper anyway: it’s what makes the next switch painless.
Is there a free alternative to Tavily?
For small projects, yes: Parallel gives 5,000 requests a month, Exa $10 of credits a month, and Brave $5 of credits a month (about 1,000 searches). Tavily’s own free tier is 1,000 credits a month. For production, none of them are free.
Which one I’d pick
Cutting cost
Keirolabs or Parallel fast
$0.10 and $1 per 1,000. Either one turns an $8,000 month into a three-digit one.
Better RAG answers
Exa
Neural index, page text on request, 95.40% in a competitor’s public run.
Auditable accuracy
You.com
96.11% on SimpleQA, with the harness in a public repo.
People read the results
Brave
Independent index, no Google or Bing underneath, $5 per 1,000.
Price your volume in the calculator, or answer three questions in the picker.