Tavily vs Brave Search API: cost per 1,000 searches
Published prices compared, with the arithmetic shown. Last checked . Prices only: we have not tested reliability, speed or output quality.
At a glance
| Tavily | Brave Search API | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | search and serp apis | search and serp apis |
| Free tier | 1,000 API credits/month, no card. Free for students; 100k free credits advertised for startup-program applicants. | $5 in free credits each month (about 1,000 searches); card required for verification. |
| Entry paid price | from $30/mo | usage-based / pay as you go |
| MCP / agent support | Yes | Yes |
| Verification | full verification | full verification |
| Official pricing page | Pricing (opens official site in a new tab) | Pricing (opens official site in a new tab) |
Analysis
Brave Search API and Tavily both feed agents with web results, but Brave is a single flat-priced search index and Tavily is a credit-based bundle of search, extract, map, crawl and research.
Search
- Brave Search: $5.00 per 1,000 requests at any volume on its public page, with $5 of free credit each month (about 1,000 searches) and up to 50 queries per second. A credit card is required even for the free plan, per its FAQ.
- Tavily: $8.00 pay-as-you-go; $7.50 on Project ($30); $5.79 on Startup ($220); $5.00 on Growth ($500). Advanced search costs 2 credits.
- Brave is cheaper than Tavily at every tier except Growth, where they are equal at $5.00; at pay-as-you-go Brave costs 1.6x less.
What you get for the money
Tavily's price includes agent-oriented features (answers, extraction at 1 credit per 5 URLs, crawl/map, a research endpoint) and no card for 1,000 free credits a month. Brave sells results plus an Answers endpoint ($4 per 1,000 requests plus tokens, 2 QPS) and positions its own independent index, with high throughput.
Verdict
For plain search volume Brave is the cheaper and higher-throughput option. If your agent also needs to extract and crawl pages through the same vendor, or you do not want to hand over a card for the free tier, Tavily's bundle may justify the premium. Both offer MCP servers.
Price ladders from the data
Effective price per unit at each published plan (monthly spend shown). Overage and assumption-based rows are excluded here; see each vendor page.
AI/agent search query
Tavily
- $8.00 Pay as you go · pay as you go
- $16.00 Pay as you go (advanced search) · pay as you go
- $7.50 Project · $30/mo
- $6.67 Bootstrap · $100/mo
- $5.79 Startup · $220/mo
- $5.00 Growth · $500/mo
- $10.00 Growth (advanced search) · $500/mo
Brave Search API
- $5.00 Search · pay as you go
What we could not verify
- Tavily: Pricing page shows the Project slider ($30/4,000 credits); Bootstrap/Startup/Growth come from the official docs credits page.
- Brave Search API: Token component depends on the query; not computed.