Looking for a SerpApi alternative?
The quota resets monthly, the per-search price stings. Here's the comparison, with receipts.
✓ $1.96 per 1,000 searches at entry (theirs: $9 to $25 per 1,000)
✓ 2x faster medians in our runs: 1.05s vs 2.18s, receipts below
✓ zero-result and failed searches cost nothing
✗ SerpApi covers 100+ APIs across roughly 19 engines and platforms, and bigger plans carry their U.S. Legal Shield
→ same job for Google data, very different economics
Side by side
| CrustAPI | SerpApi | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Prepaid credits, never expire | Monthly subscription, quota resets |
| Price per 1,000 searches | $1.96 entry, to $0.40 at scale | $25 entry, $9.17 at their biggest plan |
| Free tier | 3,000 / month, no card | 250 / month |
| Web search speed (median of 4) | 1.05s, steady | 2.18s, spread 0.8 to 4.7s |
| Images (100 results) | 1.7s | 8.3s |
| Empty results | Free | Successful searches count against quota |
| Maps data | Counts, hours, sites, stars | Lean place fields |
| Engines beyond Google | Google only, on purpose | 100+ APIs (Bing, Baidu, eBay, more) |
| U.S. Legal Shield (scraping liability cover) | No | Yes, with the Production Plan and above |
| AI Overview field | Not yet | Yes |
| Agent tooling | MCP, CLI, x402 agent self-pay | MCP (hosted) + IDE plugins |
SerpApi figures from their public pricing page and our probes of their API on a real account, July 11, 2026. Anything stale? Email support@crustapi.com and we'll fix it.
The subscription receipt
We pulled SerpApi's own account API before and after our benchmark run. The numbers below are copied from it, not paraphrased.
Raw timings, the quota before-and-after, and the exact script: the benchmark file. Re-run it yourself.
Switching is a small rename
Both APIs are a GET request returning JSON. The result fields carry different names, so your parser needs a handful of renames and nothing else.
| SerpApi field | CrustAPI field | |
|---|---|---|
| organic_results | organic | same item fields inside |
| related_questions | peopleAlsoAsk | |
| related_searches | relatedSearches | |
| knowledge_graph | knowledgeGraph | |
| images_results | images | |
| engine=google param | type=web param | 12 surfaces behind one type= |
| api_key in the URL | x-api-key header | keys stay out of logs |
Rename those, and your database schema and prompts keep working. That's the migration.
Why people switch
The subscription clock goes away
SerpApi quotas reset every month whether you searched or not. CrustAPI is prepaid: buy credits once, use them whenever, and our terms say in writing that they never expire.
A tenth of the price, or less
Their Developer plan works out to $15 per 1,000 searches; our entry pack is $1.96 per 1,000, falling to $0.40 at scale. Same Google data, drawn below.
Twice as fast, and steady
Measured July 11: our web median 1.05s with a 1.0 to 1.2s spread; theirs 2.18s swinging from 0.8 to 4.7s. Their 100-image search took 8.3 seconds; ours took 1.7.
You only pay when it works
One credit per successful search; zero results and failures cost nothing. Lead-gen lists full of niche businesses stop costing you money on the misses.
Entry pack, falling to $0.40 per 1,000 at scale. Prepaid, no plan, credits never expire.
Developer plan ($75 / 5,000). Starter is $25 per 1,000; their biggest listed plan reaches $9.17.
Speed, measured
Identical queries, same machine, SerpApi's cache disabled so the timings are real. Medians of four runs for web.
Four queries, one day, one machine: a sample, not a law. The raw numbers, the quota receipts, and the script are in benchmarks/serpapi-crustapi-2026-07-11.txt, so re-run it from your own infrastructure.
Pricing, without the subscription
Their plans run from $25 per 1,000 searches on Starter down to $9.17 per 1,000 on Big Data, per their public pricing page. Miss a month and the quota resets anyway.
$75 x 12 for up to 60,000 searches, whether you run them or not.
A $49 pack plus a $49 pack buys 50,000; the monthly free 3,000 covers the rest. Use them on your schedule, not a billing cycle's.
Our packs go self-serve all the way up, no sales calls: 25k $49 · 100k $149 · 500k $549 · 2.5M $1,999 · 10M $6,500 · up to 250M $100,000, ex-tax.
When SerpApi is the better pick: you need engines beyond Google (they cover 100+ APIs across roughly 19 engines and platforms, including Bing, Baidu, eBay, and YouTube), your procurement requires their U.S. Legal Shield (included with their Production Plan and above), or you want an AI Overview field today. Those are real advantages and we don't match them.
Which should you pick?
Other SerpApi alternatives
We're one option, not the only one. If neither of us fits:
Switch in three steps
- Sign up. 3,000 free credits a month, no card, so the trial costs nothing.
- Point requests at crustapi.com/v1/search?type=web with your key in x-api-key. Run both APIs in parallel for a week (the parameter mapping is in the questions below), then cut over.
- Compare the responses and the bill, and keep whichever wins. If it's us, cancel the subscription and use whatever's left of this month's quota.
Common questions
Run the test yourself
Point your real queries at both APIs for a day. It costs nothing on our side, and the results decide, not this page.
Get 3,000 free credits