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
CrustAPI vs SerpApi
| 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 | 13 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.
How much does CrustAPI cost?
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.
| Pack | You pay | Per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Free, 3,000 credits a month | $0, no card | Free |
| 25,000 credits | $49 | $1.96 |
| 100,000 credits | $149 | $1.49 |
| 500,000 credits | $549 | $1.10 |
| 2.5 million credits | $1,999 | $0.80 |
Packs continue up to 250 million credits for $100,000, which is $0.40 per 1,000. Prices ex-tax.
All packs are self-serve, no sales calls, and credits never expire. A search bills one credit only when it succeeds; Maps bills one credit per business returned.
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:
Prices normalized to real Google searches from each vendor's public pricing page, July 12, 2026 (Bright Data re-checked August 4, 2026). All ten in one table, with the credit-multiplier math decoded: the full roundup.
How do you switch?
- 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
The data is the same; the field names differ. organic_results becomes organic, related_questions becomes peopleAlsoAsk, knowledge_graph becomes knowledgeGraph, images_results becomes images. The item fields inside (title, link, snippet, position) match. It's a rename pass in one parser file, and the mapping table above covers it.
Per 1,000 Google searches at list prices, yes: our packs run $1.96 down to $0.40 per thousand, their plans run $25 down to $9.17 per thousand. The caveat: they cover 100+ APIs across other engines and carry a U.S. Legal Shield, which is part of what their price buys. If you only need Google data, you're paying for coverage you don't use.
We build for exactly thirteen Google surfaces and nothing else, and that narrow scope is the speed. In our July 11 runs the median gap was about 2x on web and about 5x on images; the raw numbers are linked above, run them yourself.
SerpApi returns one today and we don't. If you need it now, that's a real reason to stay, and it's on our roadmap. Everything else in the response (organic, knowledge graph, people-also-ask, related searches) is covered.
No, on purpose. Google is the deepest data source and we'd rather be excellent at thirteen Google surfaces than mediocre at eighty engines. If you need Bing or Baidu, SerpApi is the right tool.
New, launched in 2026, and we won't pretend otherwise; what de-risks it: no subscription or contract, credits never expire, and the free tier is 3,000 a month. If you're moving serious volume, email support@crustapi.com with your numbers and we'll tell you straight whether we can carry it.
The status page at status.crustapi.com is public and externally monitored. Failures return clean JSON errors your retry logic can handle, and failed requests are never billed, so an outage costs you nothing. When something does break, email support@crustapi.com and a human answers.
Their terms say SerpApi assumes the liabilities of scraping search results, with up to $2 million in coverage, for claims brought in US courts. It comes with their Production Plan and above, not with Free, Starter, or Developer. We don't sell legal cover: we collect public, logged-out pages only, and that logged-out, public-only approach has repeatedly defeated computer-fraud and contract claims. If your legal team requires that contract anyway, SerpApi is the right pick.
Web, Maps, Places, News, Shopping, Images, Videos, Lens, Scholar, Patents, Autocomplete, Reviews, and webpage scraping. Thirteen surfaces, one endpoint. The full reference is at crustapi.com/docs.
Clay
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.
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