You.com free tier includes Web Search API for AI agents… Verified November 2026. Compare with 9 alternatives in AI / ML.

You.com 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://you.com/llms.txt, where it says: “Returns real-time web and news results as LLM-ready JSON.” How we use this.

Limits, pricing history, and 9 alternatives. Verified November 2026. Last updated 2026-11-03.

You.com's free tier offers Web Search API for AI agents… It's stable — the change we last considered recording restated the terms we already publish. 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. 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. New API accounts also get a $100 sign-up credit with no credit card required; no page says it renews or expires. Then pay as you go with no minimums: Web Search API $5.00 per 1,000 calls with up to 100 results per call, live page extraction $1.00 per 1,000 pages, at 10 requests a second on self-serve accounts.

We read that on 2026-11-03 from https://you.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names You.com as "you com" and states "$5" and "$1" and "$100" and "100 Web Search API queries/day".

From you.com/pricing, read 2026-11-03:

Free View MCP config docs No API key, no account, no credit card 100 Web Search API queries/day via MCP Sign up only when you need more

When You'll Outgrow You.com's Free Tier

At 10 requests/sec, 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 You.com. This is a good sign — stable pricing.

View all 513 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in AI / ML

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

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:You.com
seed: c79d74f5c698dab7a60a69cc987343546ef5fadcc5edc3d51fa8c426b0af29d9
tie_count: 7

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

API docs →

Frequently Asked Questions

Is You.com free?

Yes, You.com offers a free tier: 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. New AP...

What is You.com's free tier?

You.com's free tier is called "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. New API accounts also get a $100 sign-up credit with no credit card required; no page says it renews or expires. Then pay as you go with no minimums: Web Search API $5.00 per 1,000 calls with up to 100 results per call, live page extraction $1.00 per 1,000 pages, at 10 requests a second on self-serve accounts.

Is You.com's free tier reliable?

You.com's free tier is considered stable.

Is You.com's free tier good for production?

You.com'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 You.com's pricing?

The last change we considered recording for You.com restated the terms we already publish, so we published none.

What are the best free alternatives to You.com?

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 You.com 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 You.com's free tier?

At 10 requests/sec, 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 You.com in?

You.com 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.