TL;DR
- Sign up at app.tavily.com. Your key (it starts with
tvly-) is on the dashboard right away. No card needed. - The free plan gives 1,000 credits a month. A basic search is 1 credit, advanced is 2.
- Paid: $30/month for 4,000 credits up to $500 for 100,000, or $0.008 per credit pay-as-you-go. That's $5–8 per 1,000 basic searches.
- Doing more than a few thousand searches? Keirolabs lite is $0.03–0.10 per 1,000, and leaving Tavily gets you two months free on a yearly plan.
Tavily is one of the most popular search APIs for LLM apps, mostly because it’s the default search tool in a lot of agent frameworks. If a tutorial told you to set TAVILY_API_KEY, here’s how to get one, and what you’re signing up for.
Get your Tavily API key
- Go to app.tavily.com and sign up with Google, GitHub or email.
- Copy your key from the dashboard overview. It starts with
tvly-. A default key is created for you. - Store it in an environment variable:
export TAVILY_API_KEY="tvly-..."No credit card is needed for the free Researcher plan.
Make a second key for development. If a test script loops, you can revoke it without breaking production, and the dashboard shows usage per key.
Your first request
curl -X POST https://api.tavily.com/search \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $TAVILY_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"query": "latest rust release", "search_depth": "basic", "max_results": 5}'Or in Python:
from tavily import TavilyClient
client = TavilyClient(api_key="tvly-...")
results = client.search("latest rust release", search_depth="basic", max_results=5)What Tavily costs
From Tavily’s credits documentation, November 5, 2026:
| Plan | Price | Credits a month | Per credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Researcher | Free | 1,000 | — |
| Project | $30/month | 4,000 | $0.0075 |
| Bootstrap | $100/month | 15,000 | $0.0067 |
| Startup | $220/month | 38,000 | $0.0058 |
| Growth | $500/month | 100,000 | $0.005 |
| Pay as you go | — | As used | $0.008 |
What each call costs in credits
| Endpoint | Credits |
|---|---|
| Search, basic | 1 |
| Search, advanced | 2 |
| Extract, basic | 1 per 5 successful URLs |
| Extract, advanced | 2 per 5 successful URLs |
| Map | 1 per 10 pages (2 with instructions) |
| Crawl | Map cost + extract cost |
| Research | 4–110 (mini), 15–250 (pro) |
So a basic search costs $5–8 per 1,000 depending on plan, and advanced costs $10–16.
The auto_parameters trap. With auto_parameters turned on, Tavily may switch your search to advanced depth, which costs 2 credits instead of 1. If your bill is double what you expected, set search_depth="basic" explicitly.
Is Tavily worth it?
Tavily is good at what it does: cleaned content in the results, an optional answer, and integrations everywhere. Where it hurts is volume. At $8 per 1,000 pay-as-you-go, an agent doing ten searches per task costs eight cents a task in search alone. At 100,000 tasks a month that’s $8,000.
| 1 million basic searches a month | Cost |
|---|---|
| Tavily (pay as you go) | $8,000 |
| Tavily (Growth plan + pay-as-you-go overage) | $500 + $7,200 = $7,700 |
| Brave | $5,000 |
| Exa lite | $4,000 |
| Parallel fast | $1,000 |
| Keirolabs lite | $99.99 (Startup plan, uses a third of its credits) |
The alternative most Tavily users should try
Keirolabs covers what people use Tavily for, on its own index, at a fraction of the price:
| What you use on Tavily | Tavily | Keirolabs equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Basic search | $5–8 per 1,000 | Lite: $0.03–0.10 · Fast: $0.44–1.33 |
| Search with content | Included in search | search/content: $1.33–4.00 |
| Extract | 1 credit per 5 URLs | extract: $1.78–5.33 per 1,000 |
| Answer | include_answer | answer: $0.89–2.67 per 1,000 |
| Research | 4–250 credits | deep: $1.78–5.33 per 1,000 |
Its deep search scored 96.5% on SimpleQA in a public repo, against Tavily’s self-reported 93.3%. And there’s an MCP server, so swapping it into an agent is a config change.
Two offers make switching close to free. Keirolabs gives two months free on any yearly plan if you’re leaving Tavily: send your Tavily invoice to team@keirolabs.cloud. And through Black Friday, code KEIRO20 takes 20% off. Start with 750 free credits: Keirolabs pricing.
More options in Tavily alternatives and the head-to-head Exa vs Tavily.
FAQ
Is the Tavily API free?
Yes, up to 1,000 credits a month on the Researcher plan, with no card. Students can get it free through Tavily’s student program, and startups can apply for 100,000 free credits.
Where do I find my Tavily API key?
On the dashboard at app.tavily.com, under your API keys. It starts with tvly-.
How many searches do 1,000 credits buy?
1,000 basic searches, or 500 advanced searches.
Why was I charged 2 credits for a search?
Either you used search_depth="advanced", or auto_parameters switched it for you.