How much does a SERP API cost in 2026?

SerpApi is the API most guides start with, and the one whose price surprises most. The free plan gives 250 searches a month, capped at 50 an hour. Starter costs $25 a month for 1,000 searches: $25 per 1,000, forty times DataForSEO's queued rate. The per-1,000 cost then falls tier by tier: $15 on Developer ($75 for 5,000), $10 on Production ($150 for 15,000), $9.17 on Big Data ($275 for 30,000), $7.25 on Searcher ($725 for 100,000) and $3.75 on Cloud 1M ($3,750). The ladder keeps going to Cloud 54M at $106,050, about $1.96 per 1,000.

What you pay for: dozens of engines beyond Google (Bing, YouTube, Amazon, Google Maps and more), parsed AI Overviews and AI Mode, and an hourly throughput that grows with the plan (200 an hour on Starter, 6,000 on Big Data). We compared it for a developer who needs the whole page parsed: it is still the reference, but at low volume you pay a premium for the brand and the breadth.

The trap is the monthly quota. Need 6,000 searches? Developer stops at 5,000, so you either pay Production at $150 or turn on automatic early renewal, which bills Developer again the moment you run out. Both cost $150 that month. For the full picture and the switch options, read our SerpApi alternatives.

Serper is the cheap real-time option for Google. No subscription: you buy a pack of credits and spend it. Starter costs $50 for 50,000 credits, $1.00 per 1,000. Standard drops to $0.75 ($375 for 500,000), Scale to $0.50 ($1,250 for 2.5 million) and Ultimate to $0.30 ($3,750 for 12.5 million). New accounts get 2,500 free queries with no credit card, a one-time allowance rather than a monthly one.

The catch every pack shares: credits are valid for 6 months. Size the pack on six months of real usage, not on the per-1,000 rate. At 20,000 searches a month, a $375 Standard pack serves 120,000 searches before it expires: your real cost is $3.13 per 1,000, three times the Starter rate. Three $50 Starter packs would have covered the same six months for $150.

Serper covers Google products (search, images, news, maps, places, shopping, scholar, patents) and nothing else. It returns live results without cache. More detail in our Serper alternatives page.

DataForSEO bills each SERP, a page of up to 10 organic results, from a prepaid balance. Three speeds, three prices: $0.60 per 1,000 in the standard queue, $1.20 in the priority queue (about a minute on average) and $2.00 in live mode (about 6 seconds). There is no subscription. The minimum top-up is $50, and the balance never expires: at the queued rate, $50 buys 83,333 SERPs, which you can spread over a year or more.

Read the unit carefully. A request for 100 results is 10 SERPs, so the queued price becomes $6 per 1,000 queries, and live mode $20. Rank trackers that only watch the top 10 pay the headline rate; SEO tools that pull the top 100 pay ten times more. New accounts get a $1 trial credit to measure their own mix before topping up.

It suits agencies and SEO products running large batches overnight. For an app that needs an answer while a user waits, compare its live rate, not its queued one. Our DataForSEO alternatives page covers the tools teams switch to.

Bright Data's SERP API has three doors. The free tier gives 5,000 requests every month with no credit card. Pay as you go costs $1.50 per 1,000 requests, billed on successful requests, with a monthly spend limit you set. The Scale plan costs $499 a month for 380,000 requests, about $1.31 per 1,000, then $1.30 per 1,000 beyond.

The math on Scale is simple: below about 333,000 requests a month, pay as you go costs less than $499. At 100,000 requests a month, pay as you go costs $150, under a third of the Scale fee. Only commit to Scale once your volume is steady above that line. One more lever: Bright Data matches a new account's first deposit dollar for dollar, up to $500, so a first $150 deposit becomes a $300 balance.

It fits data teams with spiky volume. Our Bright Data review and the full Bright Data pricing breakdown go further, and our Bright Data alternatives list the other options.

SearchApi sells monthly plans built like SerpApi's, at a lower rate. Developer costs $40 a month for 10,000 searches, $4 per 1,000. Production is $100 for $3 per 1,000, BigData $250 for $2.50, and Scale $500 for $2. You get 100 free requests to try it.

At equal volume the gap with SerpApi is wide: 30,000 searches a month cost $275 on SerpApi Big Data, and $100 on SearchApi Production, which includes 35,000. Production and the plans above add the Legal Protection Guarantee, which Developer does not include. The limit is the same as any monthly plan: the quota is sized for your peak month, and a quiet month still costs the full fee.

Scrapingdog sells credits that work across all its scrapers. Lite costs $40 a month for 200,000 credits, Standard $90 for 1 million, Pro $200 for 3 million. A Google search costs 5 credits on the Light API and 10 on the Advance API. In real searches, Lite gives 40,000 light searches, $1.00 per 1,000; Standard 200,000, $0.45; Pro 600,000, $0.33.

Two details lower the bill further. From Standard up, unused credits carry over to the next billing cycle, which removes the use-it-or-lose-it pressure of most monthly plans. And annual billing is priced at ten months for twelve. Accounts start with 100 free credits, enough for 20 light searches. Our web scraping tools ranking covers its general scraper.

Oxylabs bills Google results through its Web Scraper API with monthly plans priced per 1,000 results. Without JavaScript rendering, Starter costs $15 a month for up to 15,000 results, $1.00 per 1,000; Basic $100 a month brings the rate to $0.90 (up to 111,000), Flexible $500 a month to $0.70 (up to 714,000), and enterprise plans to $0.50 (from 5 million). With JavaScript rendering, it runs from $1.35 down to $0.90. A $5 welcome credit lets you try it, and enterprise plans start at $2,500 a month.

It is built for companies with steady, large volumes and procurement teams. For a side project, its entry rate matches Serper's $1.00, but you'll need the JavaScript rate for some SERP features. See our Oxylabs alternatives for the options around it.

ScrapingBee's plans look cheap: Hobby $19 a month for 75,000 credits, Freelance $49 for 250,000, Startup $99 for 1 million. But a Google search costs 10 credits with light requests, 15 otherwise. Hobby is really 5,000 to 7,500 searches, $2.53 per 1,000 at best. Freelance comes to $1.96 and Startup to $0.99, in light mode.

Credits last one month and don't roll over, so size the plan on your average month, not your best one. It makes sense when the same team also scrapes regular web pages with the same credits; for Google results alone, Scrapingdog or Serper cost less per search.

A bigger Serper pack lowers the rate per 1,000, but every pack expires after 6 months. At 20,000 searches a month, the $375 Standard pack (500,000 credits) leaves 380,000 credits unused when it expires: $3.13 per 1,000 searches actually made. Buying a $50 Starter pack each time you run out costs $250 a year for the same 240,000 searches.

The rule: only move to a bigger pack when six months of your real usage fill it. DataForSEO balances never expire, which makes a $50 top-up the safer bet for irregular usage.

Monthly quotas punish the month you go slightly over. At SerpApi, 6,000 searches don't fit Developer (5,000), so you pay $150, either on Production or through a second Developer renewal. That's $25 per 1,000 instead of $15. Before upgrading, check whether caching repeat queries or trimming low-value keywords brings you back under 5,000.

At SearchApi, 12,000 searches push you from Developer ($40) to Production ($100): $8.33 per 1,000 that month instead of $4.

DataForSEO bills per SERP of 10 results, and the depth parameter multiplies the price: the top 100 costs ten times the top 10. On 100,000 queued keywords a month, that's $60 for the top 10 and $600 for the top 100. Most rank trackers only report the first 20 or 30 positions.

Other DataForSEO parameters multiply the bill too: a search operator in the keyword (site:, inurl:, intitle:) multiplies the base price by 5, an AI Overview or pixel rankings add one more base price, and each People Also Ask click adds $0.00015. A depth of 15 is billed as 20 results, two SERPs. Check your dashboard after a first batch before you scale.

DataForSEO's standard queue costs $0.60 per 1,000 SERPs, live mode $2.00: 3.3 times more for the same page. Nightly rank checks, keyword research and reports don't need a 6-second answer. Send them to the queue and keep live calls for features where a user is waiting on screen. At 300,000 SERPs a month, that's $180 against $600.

Four APIs refill a free allowance every month: Bright Data (5,000 requests), Exa ($10 of credits, so 2,500 searches), Brave ($5 of credits, so 1,000 searches) and Tavily (1,000 credits). SerpApi adds 250 searches. A prototype or an internal tool under 5,000 Google searches a month can run on Bright Data's free tier alone, at no cost.

Serper's 2,500 free queries and ScrapingBee's 1,000 credits are one-time trial allowances: useful to measure, not to run on.

Scrapingdog prices annual billing at ten months for twelve: Standard costs $900 a year instead of $1,080, and from Standard up, unused credits carry over. Commit yearly once three months of usage confirm the plan is right.