Linkup free tier includes Web search API for AI agents… Catalogue date September 2026. Compare with 9 alternatives in AI / ML.

Linkup Free Tier 2026

stable

Subtypes in AI / ML: web_search_api — answers a query with current web results shaped for a model to read. We read that on 2026-09-27 from https://www.linkup.so/llms.txt, where it says: “Linkup is a web search API that gives AI applications and agents real-time, grounded access to the web through a single API call” How we use this.

Limits, pricing history, and 9 alternatives. Catalogue date September 2026. Last updated 2026-11-13.

Linkup's free tier offers Web search API for AI agents… It's stable — zero pricing changes recorded. Best for ai / ml workloads — 9 alternatives available.

One of 89 AI / ML services we track. See our full AI / ML Free Tier Comparison →

Tier

Free

Free Tier Details

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. Linkup's app asks other sign-ups to add a card, with no charge, to unlock the credit. Rate limit: 10 queries a second per organization. Then pay as you go from a prepaid balance: search $0.005 a call ($0.006 with a sourced answer or structured output), deep search $0.05 to $0.055, fetch from $0.001. Top-ups of $1,000 or more earn 10-20% bonus credit.

Linkup runs its own MCP server. "Linkup MCP Server allows you to use the Linkup API in your MCP clients." (From https://docs.linkup.so/pages/integrations/mcp/mcp, read 2026-10-20.) The endpoint is https://mcp.linkup.so/mcp, the transport is HTTP, and authentication uses a Linkup API key in the header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY", or in the apiKey URL parameter.

We read that on 2026-11-13 from https://www.linkup.so/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Linkup as "linkup" and states "$0.001" and "$0.006" and "$0.005". A source check reads the cited page for the service's name and a price; the limits above are from our own record.

From linkup.so/pricing, read 2026-11-13:

Run 4,000 queries for free.

Startups can apply for a one-time credit of up to $5,000 by telling Linkup what they are building. (From linkup.so/startups, read 2026-10-12.)
When the account's credit runs out, the API responds with HTTP 429. (From docs.linkup.so/pages/documentation/platform/pricing, read 2026-10-12.)

When You'll Outgrow Linkup's Free Tier

When your usage exceeds the free tier limits, you'll need to upgrade.
At that point, the 9 alternatives in AI / ML are each listed with the free tier they offer, so you can compare what they give you against what you have outgrown.

Pricing Change History (0 recorded)

No recorded pricing changes for Linkup. This is a good sign — stable pricing.

View all 513 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in AI / ML

How Linkup 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
Linkup	Free	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
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
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
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
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
SerpApi	Free Real-time search engine scraping API. Returns structured JSON results for Google, YouTube, Bing, Baidu, Walmart, and many other engines.	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.

See full comparison →

Recompute today's order yourself. The order above is a permutation seeded only on the UTC date and the query key — no vendor name, slug, id or offer field is an input. The list above is every one of the 9 entries in that order, not a prefix of it. The algorithm is published, so anyone can reproduce this page's order without asking us.

date: 2026-11-14
query_key: alternatives:AI / ML:Linkup
seed: 69d590bf825cad2799f1c1df8a74f86f5f3ddc61e1f94a772561ce355f0e4560
tie_count: 7

Watch Linkup for Pricing Changes

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=Linkup
curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Linkup

API docs →

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Linkup free?

Yes, Linkup offers a free tier: 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... Linkup runs its own MCP server. "Linkup MCP Server allows you to use the Linkup API in your MCP clients." (From https://docs.linkup.so/pages/integrations/mcp/mcp, read 2026-10-20.) The endpoint is https://mcp.linkup.so/mcp, the transport is HTTP, and authentication uses a Linkup API key in the header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY", or in the apiKey URL parameter.

What is Linkup's free tier?

Linkup's free tier is called "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. Linkup's app asks other sign-ups to add a card, with no charge, to unlock the credit. Rate limit: 10 queries a second per organization. Then pay as you go from a prepaid balance: search $0.005 a call ($0.006 with a sourced answer or structured output), deep search $0.05 to $0.055, fetch from $0.001. Top-ups of $1,000 or more earn 10-20% bonus credit. Startups can apply for a one-time credit of up to $5,000 by telling Linkup what they are building. (From https://www.linkup.so/startups, read 2026-10-12.) When the account's credit runs out, the API responds with HTTP 429. (From https://docs.linkup.so/pages/documentation/platform/pricing, read 2026-10-12.) Linkup runs its own MCP server. "Linkup MCP Server allows you to use the Linkup API in your MCP clients." (From https://docs.linkup.so/pages/integrations/mcp/mcp, read 2026-10-20.) The endpoint is https://mcp.linkup.so/mcp, the transport is HTTP, and authentication uses a Linkup API key in the header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY", or in the apiKey URL parameter.

Is Linkup's free tier reliable?

Linkup's free tier is considered stable.

Is Linkup's free tier good for production?

Linkup's free tier can be suitable for small production workloads and side projects. We rate it stable and it offers Web search API for AI agents…, so it's a reasonable starting point. Monitor your usage against the limits and have an upgrade plan ready.

What changed in Linkup's pricing?

No, Linkup has had no recorded pricing changes. This is a positive stability signal.

What are the best free alternatives to Linkup?

We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 9 free alternatives to Linkup in AI / ML, each listed above with its tier. Of those, 7 carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold, so they are listed in an order that rotates daily, 2 are demoted with the reason named. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.

When will I outgrow Linkup's free tier?

When your usage exceeds the free tier limits, you'll need to upgrade. When you outgrow the free tier, evaluate paid plans against alternatives — sometimes a competitor's free tier covers what you need.

What category is Linkup in?

Linkup is categorized under AI / ML on AgentDeals. We list 9 other AI / ML services alongside it, every one of them on this page with its free tier and the stability we publish for it.