Jina AI has no ongoing free tier; what it offers is a credit grant that runs out. Search, Reader, embeddings and reranker APIs… Verified October 2026. Compare with 14 alternatives in AI / ML.
Source states a free price: The page we cite for Jina AI states in words that it is free, which confirms the price — the limits stated here come from our own record rather than from that page.
Subtypes in AI / ML: web_search_api — answers a query with current web results shaped for a model to read; embeddings_api — returns a vector for text or media so it can be compared to other vectors; the vector is the output, not a completion. We read that on 2026-09-27 from https://docs.jina.ai/, where it says: “Given a search term, get an LLM-friendly version of all websites in the search results.” and from https://jina.ai/embeddings/, where it says: “Top-performing multimodal multilingual long-context embeddings for search, RAG and agent applications.” How we use this.
Jina AI has no ongoing free tier; what it offers is a credit grant that runs out: Search, Reader, embeddings and reranker APIs… It's stable — the change we last considered recording restated the terms we already publish.
Search, Reader, embeddings and reranker APIs. Each new API key comes with 10M free tokens, shared across these APIs; no page says they renew. Jina's FAQ states for the hosted API: "No separate license needed. Commercial use is covered by the service terms: sign up and pay through this site or the cloud marketplace." CC BY-NC 4.0 covers self-hosting the model weights. The exception is jina-embeddings-v4, which is non-commercial only even through the API. Search (s.jina.ai) needs a key and costs at least 10,000 tokens a request, so the free tokens cover at most 1,000 searches. Search allows 100 requests a minute with a free key and the same with a paid key; only a premium key raises it, to 1,000. Reader (r.jina.ai), which converts a URL to LLM-friendly text, allows 500 requests a minute with a free or paid key, 5,000 with a premium key, and 20 without a key. Reader without a key is free and uses no tokens, so it keeps working after a key's free tokens run out. Paid tokens are prepaid: 1 billion for $50 ($0.05 per million), or 11 billion for $500 with a premium key. Jina AI has been part of Elastic since October 2025.
Jina AI runs its own MCP server. "A remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for the Jina Reader, Search, Embeddings and Reranker APIs" (From https://github.com/jina-ai/MCP, read 2026-10-20.) The endpoint is https://mcp.jina.ai/v1, the transport is HTTP, and authentication uses a Jina API key in the header "Authorization: Bearer <JINA_API_KEY>".
Don't panic! Every new API key comes with 10M free tokens!
No recorded pricing changes for Jina AI. This is a good sign — stable pricing.
How Jina AI compares against every one of the 14 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Jina AI | Free Credits | stable |
| Cohere | Free AI model API for Command chat models, Embed, Rerank, Transcribe and Parse. Every account starts with a Trial API key: calls made with it are free and limited to 1,000 API calls a month. |
stable |
| Brave Search API | Free $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. |
stable |
| 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 |
| Google Gemini API | Free (Reduced) Free tier: Gemini 4 Hydrogen, Gemini 3.8 Flash, 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.1 Flash-Lite, Gemini 3 Flash Preview, Gemini Embedding 2 and Gemma 4 are free of charge. Also free of charge are Gemini 3.8 Live (real-time voice), Gemini 3.5 Live Translate (translation), Gemini 3.5 Transcribe… |
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 |
| Google Gemini Embedding 2 | Free Free of charge text, image, audio, and video input on the Gemini API free tier, with Google using the content to improve its products. Batch is not available on the free tier. |
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 |
| Pinecone | Free Vector database. The Starter plan is free: up to 2 GB storage, 2M write units and 1M read units a month, 1 GB of egress a month (reads that return data stop at the cap until the next billing period), 5 indexes, 1 project and 2 users, on AWS us-east-1 only. |
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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Together AI | Pay-as-you-go Inference API for open-source models, billed per token. Together AI does not currently offer free trials; access requires a minimum $15 credit purchase for an organization's first purchase ($5 for later purchases), and the platform is fully prepaid. |
unrated |
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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=Jina%20AI
curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Jina%20AI