Free Brave Search API (2026): $5 Credit, Limits, Alternatives

Search for “free Brave Search API” and you get three different answers: 2,000 free queries a month, $5 of free credit, and “up to $20”. All three sit on pages that look current. Only one of them matches what Brave’s pricing pages say today.

Brave is a real, official, close-to-free option, and for a small project it may be all you need. So we read Brave’s own pricing, docs, blog and Terms of Use, then the pages of the alternatives, and did the maths. Here is where the free part fits and where it stops.

The options at a glance

One option here is official, a few are hosted APIs that return Brave data or something close to it, and two are free but unofficial. Everything below was read on 23 October 2026.

Checked 2026-10-23. Sources are linked in each section below.

What Brave’s free plan really is in 2026

There is no plan called Free any more. What exists is free credit. Brave’s pricing page lists the Search plan at $5.00 per 1,000 requests, “free $5 in credits every month” and a capacity of 50 requests per second. Divide $5 by $5 per 1,000 and the credit covers 1,000 requests. That division is ours; Brave does not print it.

Brave pricing page, read 2026-10-23.

Why you see three different numbers

• 2,000 a month. That was the old free plan. Brave’s own comparison guide still says “It’s free to try (for up to 2,000 queries per month)”, but no plan on the pricing page carries that name now. Treat the pricing page as current and the guide as out of date.
• “Up to $20.” The banner on Brave’s API page says “Up to $20 in free calls every month”. Brave’s 12 February 2026 blog post explains it: every plan gets $5 a month, “$20 across all plans”. Those four plans are Search, Answers, Spellcheck and Autocomplete. For web search, only the Search plan’s $5 counts.
• $5. The plan card. This is the number that matches the billing.

Card, attribution and rate

• A card is required. Brave’s quickstart lists “A credit card to activate a plan” as a prerequisite, and its FAQ says the card is “to prevent abuse”. It also says Brave uses prepaid credits, not subscriptions, and that you are “only charged for credits you choose to buy”. The pages we read do not say what happens when the free credit runs out and you have bought none. Some third-party posts claim the card is billed; we could not confirm that either way.
• Attribution is unclear. The launch blog says the free credit is for those who credit the Brave Search API on their website or about pages. The pricing page does not mention it, and the Terms of Use say a customer “may provide attribution” and set the format if you do. If you want the credit, plan to add the credit line and ask Brave if you are unsure.
• The rate is generous. The Search plan allows 50 requests per second, counted over a one-second sliding window. Over the limit you get a 429 and the request fails, and the rate-limit guide says only successful requests are counted and billed. The 1-request-a-second cap people remember from the old free plan is not on the pages we read.

What one request returns

Brave’s Web Search documentation sets a maximum of 20 results per request (count) and a maximum offset of 9, and says a request may return fewer than you ask for. Each extra page is another billed request. Our arithmetic: a query that needs 100 results takes five requests, which is $25 per 1,000 such queries before the credit.

The same page describes freshness filters, country and language targeting, SafeSearch, search operators in the query, up to five extra snippets per result, Goggles for custom re-ranking, and a two-step local places lookup whose IDs expire after about 8 hours. It also describes rich data for things like weather and stocks. We did not find People Also Ask, ads or related-search blocks described on that page, so check Brave’s response reference if you need them.

Where Brave’s free credit fits, and where it stops

Be fair to Brave first. It is the source of record for its own index, it publishes its prices, and it has a feature set aimed at AI agents: an LLM Context endpoint, an Answers plan with cited answers, and Goggles. Its Enterprise plan lists zero data retention and invoicing, and the API page says SOC 2 Type II. For a prototype, a side project or an agent that makes a few hundred searches a month, $5 of credit with no monthly bill is hard to beat.

The limits start to matter when:

• You pass about 1,000 requests a month. Every request after that is $0.005.
• You need deep lists. Twenty results a request means several billed requests for one long list.
• You want to keep what you collect. The Terms of Use set rules on storage, as the next section shows.
• You need SERP features. If your work needs People Also Ask answers, ads or related searches as structured fields, Brave’s documentation does not describe them.
• You want one key for several engines. Brave’s API returns Brave’s results only.

The Terms of Use most “free API” posts skip

We read Brave’s Search API Terms of Use, last updated 1 September 2026. These restrictions matter most, in the document’s own words:

• AI models. You shall not “use the Search Results to create, evaluate, train, re-train, fine-tune, benchmark or otherwise improve artificial intelligence models or services”.
• Limits. You shall not “circumvent or bypass rate limits or service limits through any method, including by creating multiple accounts”.
• Ending. Brave may end the agreement “for any reason upon 10 days prior written notice”, and after it ends you may not keep Search Results.

Brave’s terms also set rules on storing and redistributing results, so read them and ask your own counsel before you build anything that keeps or passes on results.

We are not lawyers: read the terms and ask your own counsel. The point is general. Read the terms of any API you use, ours included.

What free really costs you

For a prototype, free is a real price. For anything a customer depends on, five costs show up.

1. A card on file, and a ceiling. The credit ends at about 1,000 requests, and the pages do not say what happens next.
2. Strings on how you use the data. An attribution line, plus the storage and AI-training rules in the terms.
3. Short pages. Twenty results a request, ten pages at most.
4. Time, if you go unofficial. The ddgs library lists Brave as a text search engine, and its README says “This library is for educational purposes only.” SearXNG’s Brave engine reads Brave’s web interface, and its docs say that going past 9 pages “won’t return any result and you will most likely be flagged as a bot”. Neither is a service. We cover that route in scraping Brave for free.
5. Support. Brave lists “enterprise-grade support” under Enterprise; the Search plan card lists none.

Here is a worked example. A rank report runs 5,000 Brave searches a month. On Brave’s API that is 5,000 × $0.005 − $5 = $20. On Serpent’s Default tier it is 5,000 × $0.0006 = $3.00. The gap is small in dollars and large in percent. It is an illustration, not a quote.

The near-free options, one by one

“Near-free” here means a small free allowance, or pay-as-you-go prices of a few dollars or less per 1,000 searches. Each option gets the same checklist: price, free tier, what you get, watch-outs, best for.

Serpent

• Price: $0.60 per 1,000 calls at the Default tier, with no monthly plan. A one-time $100 deposit moves you to $0.30 per 1,000 (Growth), $500 to $0.10 (Scale) and $1,000 to $0.03 (Enterprise). The deposit is spendable balance, not a fee; the minimum first deposit is $10. Against Brave’s $5 per 1,000, that is about 8 times lower on Default and about 17 times lower on Growth (our division).
• Free tier: 10 free calls on signup, shared across services, plus one free demo run a day on the Brave Search API page.
• What you get: engine=brave on /api/search and /api/search/quick. Quick returns organic results only. Deep returns People Also Ask with answers, related searches, rich snippets, ads and inline videos, plus knowledge panel and local pack where Brave shows them, and an opt-in AI digest with include_aio=true on paid plans. Country targeting covers 112 codes, with language, freshness and SafeSearch filters and up to 100 results per call (num is a ceiling, best-effort at the high end).
• Billing: pay as you go. Deposited credits do not expire; promotional bonus credits expire after 30 days (see pricing). Quick bills one call however many results you ask for. Deep bills one unit per page requested.
• Watch-outs: the free allowance is about a hundredth of Brave’s monthly credit. On Default balances the standard limits are 100 calls a minute, 1,000 an hour and 10,000 a day (100,000 a day after $500 in total deposits), well below Brave’s 50 requests a second. We do not offer Brave’s Goggles, LLM Context or Answers plans, and the Brave engine returns no pixel positions.
• Best for: steady Brave volume above about 1,100 searches a month, rank tracking, and anyone who wants one key across several engines.

SerpApi

• Price: $25 a month for 1,000 searches, $75 for 5,000, $150 for 15,000, $725 for 100,000 and $3,750 for 1 million.
• Free tier: 250 searches a month, limited to 50 an hour.
• Brave: its Brave product is an AI Mode API: it returns an answer in markdown with references, web results and related questions. The page does not say whether a plain Brave web search API exists. Our Brave coverage post compares the Brave-result options, as checked on 2026-09-16.
• Best for: teams that already use it for Google and want one familiar vendor and a fixed monthly bill.

Apify community actors

• Price: one Brave actor says “from $1.99 / 1,000 search results”, paid per event plus platform usage. At 20 results a search that works out to roughly $40 per 1,000 searches, or $20 at 10 results (our arithmetic).
• Watch-outs: actors are built by third parties. That page shows 4 total users and 64.5% of runs succeeded, and does not mention a free plan.
• Best for: one-off jobs where you do not want to write code.

Serper (Google results)

• Price: credit bundles: $50 for 50,000 ($1.00 per 1,000), $375 for 500,000 ($0.75), $1,250 for 2.5 million ($0.50) and $3,750 for 12.5 million ($0.30). Credits are valid for 6 months.
• Free tier: 2,500 free queries, no card. The page does not say whether that is one-off.
• Watch-outs: Google results only, so it does not replace a Brave result list. It is a fair pick if your real question is “what is the cheapest search API”.

Tavily and Exa

• Tavily: 1,000 credits a month free, no card; $0.008 per credit pay as you go; $30 a month for 4,000 credits. Its credit docs say a basic search costs 1 credit and an advanced one 2.
• Exa: $10 of free credit that resets monthly, up to 2,500 Lite searches, no payment method; $4 per 1,000 Lite searches, $7 for Auto and $12 for deep search.
• Best for: retrieval inside an AI agent. They are not Brave result lists, so they suit a different job from rank tracking.

Options that are gone

Two older names still turn up. Google’s Custom Search JSON API says it is “closed to new customers” and ends on 1 January 2027. Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on 11 August 2025, per its retirement notice. We cover the Bing side in free Bing SERP API and the Google side in free Google SERP API guide.

What it costs at 1K, 10K, 100K and 1M searches

Per-1,000 prices are how vendors like to be compared. Monthly bills are what you pay. This table prices one month of web searches on the cheapest published route that covers the volume. Read it as arithmetic, not an offer.

Checked 2026-10-23. Serpent Growth needs a one-time $100 deposit, Scale $500 and Enterprise $1,000; the deposit is spendable balance. Serpent columns use Quick Search, one call per search.

How each column was built. Brave is requests × $0.005 minus the $5 monthly credit. Serpent is searches multiplied by the published rate. Serper is the cheapest set of whole bundles that covers the volume: one $50 bundle at 10,000, two at 100,000, two $375 bundles at 1 million. Exa is $4 per 1,000 minus the $10 credit. Tavily is 1 credit a search at $0.008 each, assuming the free 1,000 credits count first. SerpApi is the cheapest plan that fits: Starter at 1,000 because its free tier is only 250, Production at 10,000, Searcher at 100,000 and Cloud 1M at 1 million.

Two things stand out. Under about 1,000 searches a month, Brave’s credit wins outright: it is $0, against 60 cents on Serpent’s Default rate. The lines cross near 1,140 searches a month on Default and near 1,060 on Growth (our arithmetic). After that the gap widens with every thousand.

A careful word on price. Among the Brave web-search sources we checked today, which were Brave’s own API, SerpApi’s Brave product and the Apify actors, Serpent’s published rate is the lowest we found, from $0.60 down to $0.03 per 1,000 depending on deposit. That is a claim about Brave results only. For Google results, Serper’s largest bundle at $0.30 per 1,000 equals Serpent’s Growth rate, and costs $3,750 up front. Credit-bucket plans only reach their printed rate at full use; see our look at credit expiry.

How to choose

• Under about 1,000 searches a month and you can add an attribution line. Use Brave’s own API. It is official and the credit covers you.
• An AI agent that needs page content, not a result list. Brave’s LLM Context, Tavily or Exa. We compare them in best web search APIs for AI agents.
• Steady Brave volume above 1,100 a month, or you want People Also Ask and related searches as fields. A hosted API. On the numbers above this is where Serpent is the pick.
• You need to keep a history of results. Read Brave’s storage terms and ask your own counsel, or check the terms of the API you choose.
• You track several engines. One schema across engines saves parser work. See free DuckDuckGo API, free Yahoo search API and rank tracking API.
• You want to compare Brave with Google. Start with Brave versus Google SERP data.

Quick start: Brave results in one request

Set engine=brave and send your key in the X-API-Key header. This example asks for the top 20 results for a query, for the US.

curl "https://apiserpent.com/api/search/quick?q=best+password+manager&engine=brave&num=20&country=us" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

For a rank check, format=simple flattens results to a list of position, title and URL.

import requests

API = "https://apiserpent.com/api/search/quick"
KEY = "YOUR_API_KEY"

def rank_of(domain, keyword, country="us"):
    r = requests.get(
        API,
        params={"q": keyword, "engine": "brave", "country": country,
                "num": 20, "format": "simple"},
        headers={"X-API-Key": KEY},
        timeout=60,
    )
    r.raise_for_status()
    for row in r.json().get("results", []):
        if domain in row["url"]:
            return row["position"]
    return None

print(rank_of("example.com", "best password manager"))

num is a ceiling, not a promise, so check how many rows came back. The full list of parameters is in the API docs, and you can run the same call in the playground first.

Moving over from Brave’s API

• The header X-Subscription-Token becomes X-API-Key. count and offset become one num (up to 100). country stays country, search_lang becomes language, and safesearch becomes safe.
• freshness values pd, pw, pm and py become d, w, m and y.
• Results come back under results.organic (full format and Deep Search) or as a flat results list (format=simple), with title, url, snippet and a position on every row.
• Check success and the row count in the body, and cache repeated queries so you do not pay twice for the same answer.

For what Brave’s result pages carry, see Brave versus Google SERP data. Prices and tiers are on the pricing page.

Limits and what we could not verify

• We did not sign up for Brave’s API. The plans page sits behind a login. Everything about the card and free credit comes from Brave’s public pages and quickstart.
• The over-credit behaviour is unknown. We could not confirm from Brave’s pages what happens when the free credit runs out and no credits were bought.
• The attribution rule conflicts. The launch blog ties the free credit to attribution; the Terms of Use call it optional; the pricing page is silent. Ask Brave.
• Storage rules. Brave’s terms set rules on storing results; read them before you build a data set.
• Loose ends elsewhere. Serper does not say whether its 2,500 free queries are one-off, and Apify prices depend on the actor.
• No benchmarks. We make no claim about speed, success rate or result quality for any service, including ours.
• Prices move. Every figure here is a snapshot from 2026-10-23, so check the vendor pages again before you commit.

FAQ

Is the Brave Search API free?

Not in the old sense. On 2026-10-23 Brave's pricing page listed the Search plan at $5 per 1,000 requests with $5 in free credits every month, which covers about 1,000 web requests. A credit card is needed to activate a plan. Brave's blog says the credit comes with crediting Brave on your website, while its Terms of Use call attribution optional.

How do I get a free Brave Search API key?

Create an account on Brave's API dashboard, verify your email, activate the Search plan with a credit card, then create a key under API Keys. You send it in the X-Subscription-Token header. Account creation is free, and the plan includes $5 of free credit every month. We read these steps in Brave's quickstart and did not sign up ourselves.

How many requests does the Brave Search API free credit give you?

About 1,000 web requests a month. The Search plan costs $5 per 1,000 requests and includes $5 of credit, so the credit covers 1,000 requests; that division is our own arithmetic. Each request returns at most 20 results, so a query that needs 100 results takes five requests. Brave counts only successful requests.

Can I store Brave Search API results?

Brave's terms set rules on storing and redistributing results, so read them and ask your own counsel before building a data set. Brave's FAQ points to plans with storage rights; ask Brave which one fits.

What is the best Brave Search API alternative?

It depends on the job. For a few hundred searches a month, Brave's own credit is hard to beat. For steady volume, Serpent returns Brave results from one GET request at $0.60 per 1,000 calls on the Default tier, $0.30 after a $100 deposit. For AI retrieval rather than result lists, look at Tavily or Exa, which have free monthly allowances.

What is the cheapest way to get Brave search results?

Up to about 1,000 searches a month, Brave's own $5 credit makes it free. Above roughly 1,140 a month, Serpent's published $0.60 per 1,000 calls is lower than Brave's $5 per 1,000 requests, and it falls to $0.30, $0.10 and $0.03 on larger single deposits. The community Apify actor we checked is priced per result, from $1.99 per 1,000 results.

Sources

• Brave Search API, Brave API pricing and Brave quickstart
• Brave Search API Terms of Use, Brave rate limiting and Brave Web Search documentation
• Brave blog: most powerful search API for AI and Brave Search API vs the Bing API guide
• SerpApi pricing and SerpApi Brave AI Mode API
• Apify Brave Search Scraper
• Serper, Tavily pricing, Tavily API credits and Exa pricing
• ddgs on GitHub and SearXNG Brave engine
• Google Custom Search JSON API and Bing Search API retirement