Brave Search API free tier includes $5 in free credits every month, applied automatically… Verified October 2026. Compare with 9 alternatives in AI / ML.
Subtypes in AI / ML: web_search_api — answers a query with current web results shaped for a model to read. We read that on 2026-10-19 from https://brave.com/search/api/, where it says: “The real-time search data your chatbots & agents need to generate answers.” How we use this.
Brave Search API's free tier offers $5 in free credits every month, applied automatically… We rate it stable. One recorded limit reduction narrowed the terms, on 2026-02-12. Best for ai / ml workloads — 9 alternatives available.
$5 in free credits every month, applied automatically. Brave's "up to $20" figure is $5 on each of four plans: Search, Answers, Spellcheck and Autosuggest. Search is $5 per 1,000 requests; Answers is $4 per 1,000 requests plus $5 per million tokens. Web search, news, videos, images, LLM context endpoints. 50 queries/sec. Credit card required. The earlier free plan (2,000 queries/mo) ended Feb 2026. The tools of Brave's MCP server include brave_web_search, brave_news_search, brave_image_search, brave_llm_context and brave_summarizer.
Brave Search API runs its own MCP server. "An MCP server implementation that integrates the Brave Search API, providing comprehensive search capabilities including web search, local business search, place search, image search, video search, news search, LLM context, and AI-powered summarization." (From https://github.com/brave/brave-search-mcp-server, read 2026-10-20.) The npm package is @brave/brave-search-mcp-server, the transport is stdio, run with npx -y @brave/brave-search-mcp-server, and authentication uses the BRAVE_API_KEY environment variable. npm marks @modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search "Package no longer supported." (From https://www.npmjs.com/package/@modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search, read 2026-10-20.)
We read that on 2026-10-26 from https://brave.com/search/api/, and our check recorded: the page names Brave Search API as "brave search api" and states "$20" and "$5" and "$4" and "50 queries per second".
Up to $20 in free calls every month · Prepaid credits, no subscription
These alternatives were identified from Brave Search API’s pricing changes as recommended replacements.
How Brave Search API compares against every one of the 9 we list, not against a selection of them. A surface with room for every member of a tied set may rotate their order. A surface with room for only some of them names none of them, because which ones it named would be the claim, and a claim seeded on the date is not the one we serve tomorrow. How we decide this.
| Service | Free Tier | Stability |
|---|---|---|
| Brave Search API | Free | stable |
| You.com | Free Web Search API for AI agents. 100 free queries a day with no API key or account through the keyless MCP profile (api.you.com/mcp?profile=free), limited to the you-search and you-discover tools. |
stable |
| Valyu | Free Search and research API for AI agents: one credit balance covers Search, Contents and DeepResearch. Accounts without a plan get free credits every month, which reset and do not roll over: 2,000 with a work email, no card needed; 1,000 with a personal or university email, which needs a card on the… |
stable |
| SerpApi | Free Real-time search engine scraping API. Returns structured JSON results for Google, YouTube, Bing, Baidu, Walmart, and many other engines. |
stable |
| Exa | Free Web search API for AI agents with Search, Contents, Answer, Monitors and Agent endpoints. The free tier gives $10 in credits each month, up to 2,500 Lite searches, resetting on the first of the month without rollover, plus a one-time $10 onboarding bonus; no credit card or other payment method… |
caution |
| Linkup | Free Web search API for AI agents. Accounts created with a professional email address get $20 of credit, topped back up to $20 each month (Linkup's docs); the pricing page calls this 4,000 free queries and states no period. |
stable |
| Parallel | Free Web search and research APIs for AI agents. Organizations with a credit card on file get $5 of free credit each month, and unused credit expires at month end. |
stable |
| Tavily AI | Free Real-time web search API for AI agents, with search, extract, crawl and research endpoints. The free Researcher plan gives 1,000 API credits per month with no credit card required, resetting on the first of each month. |
stable |
| Serper | Free Credits Google Search API returning real-time results. 2,500 free queries when you sign up, no credit card required; a plain search uses one credit, and Maps and Lens searches use 3. |
stable |
| Jina AI | Free Credits Search, Reader, embeddings and reranker APIs. Each new API key comes with 10M free tokens, shared across these APIs; no page says they renew. |
stable |
Left out of this list: Hugging Face (shares no subtype with this product), Groq (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini API (shares no subtype with this product), Mistral AI (shares no subtype with this product), OpenRouter (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare Workers AI (shares no subtype with this product), Cerebras (shares no subtype with this product), Cohere (shares no subtype with this product), OpenAI (shares no subtype with this product), Pinecone (shares no subtype with this product), Qdrant (shares no subtype with this product), Deepgram (shares no subtype with this product), Kaggle (shares no subtype with this product), Roboflow (shares no subtype with this product), Scale AI (shares no subtype with this product), AssemblyAI (shares no subtype with this product), Replicate (shares no subtype with this product), Baseten (shares no subtype with this product), Weights & Biases (shares no subtype with this product), Comet ML (shares no subtype with this product), Clarifai (we have not classified this record), Neptune.ai (we have not classified this record), Labelbox (shares no subtype with this product), Google Colab (shares no subtype with this product), Composio (shares no subtype with this product), DeepAR (none of this category's subtypes apply), Maxim AI (shares no subtype with this product), OCR.Space (shares no subtype with this product), Parseur (shares no subtype with this product), Reducto (shares no subtype with this product), paperspace (shares no subtype with this product), Arize AX (shares no subtype with this product), Audio Enhancer (none of this category's subtypes apply), Braintrust (shares no subtype with this product), Clair (none of this category's subtypes apply), Keywords AI (shares no subtype with this product), Langfuse (shares no subtype with this product), LangSmith (shares no subtype with this product), Langtrace (we have not classified this record), LangWatch (shares no subtype with this product), Lumenfall.ai (shares no subtype with this product), Mediaworkbench.ai (none of this category's subtypes apply), Othor AI (none of this category's subtypes apply), Pollinations.AI (shares no subtype with this product), Portkey (shares no subtype with this product), ReportGPT (none of this category's subtypes apply), Zenable (none of this category's subtypes apply), xAI (shares no subtype with this product), Anthropic API (shares no subtype with this product), GitHub Models (shares no subtype with this product), NVIDIA NIM (shares no subtype with this product), Ollama Cloud (shares no subtype with this product), LLM7.io (shares no subtype with this product), SiliconFlow (shares no subtype with this product), Zhipu AI (shares no subtype with this product), DeepSeek API (shares no subtype with this product), MiniMax (shares no subtype with this product), GPU-Bridge (we have not classified this record), Google Vertex AI Agent Engine (we have not classified this record), Google Vector Search 2.0 (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini Embedding 2 (shares no subtype with this product), Alibaba Cloud Qwen Code (none of this category's subtypes apply), E2B (shares no subtype with this product), Together AI (shares no subtype with this product), Fireworks AI (shares no subtype with this product), Modal (shares no subtype with this product), ElevenLabs (we have not classified this record), Stability AI (we have not classified this record), Daytona (shares no subtype with this product), Blaxel (shares no subtype with this product), Novita Sandbox (shares no subtype with this product), Runloop (shares no subtype with this product), Mem0 (shares no subtype with this product), Zep (shares no subtype with this product), Letta (we have not classified this record), Supermemory (shares no subtype with this product), Cognee (shares no subtype with this product), Hetzner Inference API (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare AI Search (we have not classified this record). Each is still listed in AI / ML, with the vendor's own words we read that from on its page. How we decide this.
We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.
curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=Brave%20Search%20API
curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Brave%20Search%20API