Valyu free tier includes Search and research API for AI agents: one credit balance covers Search, Contents and DeepResearch… Catalogue date November 2026. Compare with 9 alternatives in AI / ML.

Valyu 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 2026-11-12 from https://docs.valyu.ai/llms.txt, where it says: “One API finds evidence in filings, papers, trials, patents, market data and the web, and returns it with citations.” How we use this.

Limits, pricing history, and 9 alternatives. Catalogue date November 2026. Last updated 2026-11-12.

Valyu's free tier offers Search and research API for AI agents: one credit balance covers Search, Contents and DeepResearch… 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

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 account from the second month (adding one charges nothing; one card unlocks free credits for one account, and prepaid cards don't count). Free monthly credits cover web search, arXiv and PubMed; other sources need a plan. A web search returning ten results uses 1 credit. Then pay as you go: $10 buys 1,600 credits, which last 12 months; Ridiculously Cheap is $29 a month for 5,000 credits. There are no overage charges: a request the balance cannot cover gets HTTP 402.

In the first month only, the first 1,000 free credits with a work email (500 with a personal email) also work on every source on Valyu's standard plans, such as filings, trials or patents. Valyu's own pricing page at www.valyu.ai states the 1,000 without the first-month limit or the personal-email figure. (From docs.valyu.ai/pricing, read 2026-11-12.)
Valyu's free credits were a one-time grant until late 2026: its changelog entry for October 2026 gives new accounts $10 of credits, or $20 with a company email, usable on every standard-plan source. Its pricing page now gives a monthly allowance that resets each month. (From docs.valyu.ai/pricing, read 2026-11-12.)

When You'll Outgrow Valyu'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 Valyu. This is a good sign — stable pricing.

View all 513 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in AI / ML

How Valyu 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
Valyu	Free	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
SerpApi	Free Real-time search engine scraping API. Returns structured JSON results for Google, YouTube, Bing, Baidu, Walmart, and many other engines.	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
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
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
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
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:Valyu
seed: b043cd972b725625f033049e749a3465db34f7184bbccf8353a6ce910fdc1e7e
tie_count: 7

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

API docs →

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Valyu free?

Yes, Valyu offers a free tier: 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...

What is Valyu's free tier?

Valyu's free tier is called "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 account from the second month (adding one charges nothing; one card unlocks free credits for one account, and prepaid cards don't count). Free monthly credits cover web search, arXiv and PubMed; other sources need a plan. A web search returning ten results uses 1 credit. Then pay as you go: $10 buys 1,600 credits, which last 12 months; Ridiculously Cheap is $29 a month for 5,000 credits. There are no overage charges: a request the balance cannot cover gets HTTP 402. In the first month only, the first 1,000 free credits with a work email (500 with a personal email) also work on every source on Valyu's standard plans, such as filings, trials or patents. Valyu's own pricing page at www.valyu.ai states the 1,000 without the first-month limit or the personal-email figure. (From https://docs.valyu.ai/pricing, read 2026-11-12.) Valyu's free credits were a one-time grant until late 2026: its changelog entry for October 2026 gives new accounts $10 of credits, or $20 with a company email, usable on every standard-plan source. Its pricing page now gives a monthly allowance that resets each month. (From https://docs.valyu.ai/pricing, read 2026-11-12.)

Is Valyu's free tier reliable?

Valyu's free tier is considered stable.

Is Valyu's free tier good for production?

Valyu's free tier can be suitable for small production workloads and side projects. We rate it stable and it offers Search and research API for AI agents: one credit balance covers Search, Contents and DeepResearch…, so it's a reasonable starting point. Monitor your usage against the limits and have an upgrade plan ready.

What changed in Valyu's pricing?

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

What are the best free alternatives to Valyu?

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 Valyu 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 Valyu'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 Valyu in?

Valyu 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.