SERP API Pricing, Five Providers Side by Side
Every price on this page was checked against the provider's public pricing page on August 4, 2026. Per-1,000 rates, free tiers, expiry rules, and the fine print that decides what you actually pay.
Price per 1,000 Google searches, provider by provider
If you are new to the category, start with what a SERP API is. The short version: query in, parsed Google results out, and since Google retired its own search API, these five are how rank trackers, lead tools, and AI agents buy SEO data. Here is what each one charges.
| Provider | Model | Per 1,000 searches | Free tier | Do credits expire? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CrustAPI | Prepaid credits, billed only on success | $1.96 entry, down to $0.65 ($49 for 25k, $6,500 for 10M) | 3,000 searches every month, no card | Never |
| serper.dev | Prepaid credits | $1.00 entry, down to $0.30 ($50 for 50k, $3,750 for 12.5M) | 2,500 queries, one time, no card | Yes, after 6 months |
| DataForSEO | Pay-as-you-go deposit, $50 minimum | $0.60 queued (about 5 min), $1.20 priority, $2.00 live; covers 10 results per query | None | Not stated on the pricing page |
| Bright Data | Pay as you go or monthly plan | $1.50 pay-as-you-go, about $1.31 on the $499/mo Scale plan (380k included) | 5,000 records a month, no card | Billed as used |
| SerpApi | Monthly subscription | $25.00 entry, down to about $9.17 ($25 for 1k/mo, $275 for 30k/mo) | 250 searches a month | Reset monthly, no rollover |
Two things jump out. First, the spread is enormous: the same 1,000 Google searches cost $0.30 on serper's largest pack and $25.00 on SerpApi's entry plan, an 83x difference. Second, the model matters as much as the rate. Prepaid credits, pay-as-you-go, and monthly subscriptions behave very differently once your usage is anything but perfectly steady. That is the next section.
serper.dev: credits expire after 6 months. The $1.00 entry rate is the lowest real-time sticker with no monthly commitment, and their own pricing page says credits are valid for 6 months. Use them in time and the rate is real. Buy ahead of demand that never arrives and the unused portion is gone. More on how the two of us differ from serper in SerpApi vs Serper.
SerpApi: unused searches vanish monthly. Plans are subscriptions, and their pricing page states unused searches do not roll over. A $150 Production month where you run 7,000 of your 15,000 searches works out to $21.43 per 1,000, not $10.00. The full plan-by-plan breakdown lives on our SerpApi pricing page, which covers that one company in depth.
DataForSEO: the $0.60 covers 10 results, delivered in about 5 minutes. The lowest sticker in the table is the standard queue, which averages around 5 minutes per task and prices one query as one SERP of 10 results. Real-time delivery is $2.00 per 1,000, pulling deeper than 10 results multiplies the price for each extra 10, and certain search operators multiply the cost by 5. For a batch rank tracker that only needs page one, it is a genuinely cheap SERP API. For live, deep pulls the math changes fast.
Bright Data: clean pay-as-you-go, higher rate. $1.50 per 1,000 with success-only billing and no prepayment to strand. The discount to about $1.31 requires the $499/mo Scale plan. If you are evaluating them for more than SERP data, our Bright Data alternative page compares the wider platforms.
CrustAPI: higher entry sticker, nothing stranded. $1.96 per 1,000 at the $49 entry pack is not the lowest number in the table and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What the price buys: credits that never expire, billing only when a search succeeds, and one flat credit per search on every Google surface except Maps, which bills one credit per business returned. The rate falls to $0.80 at the 2.5M pack and $0.65 at 10M.
Effective price = sticker divided by what you actually use
A cheap SERP API is only cheap if you consume what you paid for. One line of arithmetic changes the ranking.
Say you buy serper's entry pack: $50 for 50,000 credits at $1.00 per 1,000. Your project runs 30,000 searches, then pauses. Month 7 arrives, the remaining 20,000 credits expire, and your real rate was $50 over 30,000 searches: $1.67 per 1,000. On a monthly plan the same effect is faster. Run 7,000 of SerpApi's 15,000 Production searches in a month and the real rate is $21.43 per 1,000.
This is why "cheapest SERP API" has no single answer. Steady, predictable volume rewards the lowest sticker. Spiky, project-based, or agent-driven usage rewards whichever provider lets paid searches wait for you. On CrustAPI the $49 pack from last quarter is still worth exactly 25,000 searches this quarter, so the sticker rate and the effective rate are the same number.
What a credit actually buys
Numbers in a table are easy to type. Here is a call we ran against the live API while writing this page: one Maps search for SEO agencies in Austin. It returned 20 businesses in 459 ms. The first five rows, as CSV:
Billing on that call: Maps is the one surface priced per result, so 20 businesses cost 20 credits, and a search that finds nothing costs nothing. Every other surface, including web search, news, shopping, images, videos, scholar, and patents, bills a flat 1 credit per search. The API returns JSON; the CSV view above is a playground feature. The rows are yours to keep, with no expiry clock on either the credits or the data.
CrustAPI pricing in full
Prepaid packs, one flat credit per successful search, and a free tier that renews monthly.
Credits never expire, there is no subscription to cancel, and a failed search is never billed. The free 3,000 credits renew every month with no card, which is enough to run a real evaluation against any provider on this page before spending anything.
When another provider is the right call
We would rather you pick the right tool than the loudest page. Two cases where the answer is not us.
Huge, steady, committed volume: if you reliably burn through 12.5M searches inside 6 months, serper's $0.30 per 1,000 Ultimate pack is the lowest real-time rate on this page, below our $0.65 at the 10M pack. Patient batch jobs that only need page one: if a 5 minute queue is fine and 10 results per query is enough, DataForSEO's $0.60 per 1,000 standard queue is the cheapest way to buy SEO data in bulk.
Related: What is a SERP API · SerpApi vs Serper · SerpApi pricing · Bright Data alternative · Google Search API
Common questions
Clay
Pay for searches, not for a subscription
Every provider above sells the same Google results page. The difference is what happens to money you have already spent. CrustAPI credits never expire, failed searches never bill, and 3,000 free credits renew monthly with no card.
Get 3,000 free credits