Free Google Shopping API (2026): What's Free, What's Near-Free

Search for “free Google Shopping API” and many pages sound as if Google hands out a key. It does not. Google once had an API that read its product results, and switched it off years ago. The API with “Shopping” in its name today is built for merchants, not for people who want to read prices.

So here is the honest version. We read Google’s developer pages and the pricing pages of seven other shopping data APIs on 23 October 2026, worked out what each costs at 1,000 to 1 million calls a month, and marked where “free” stops. If you came because the Content API for Shopping stopped working, the second section is for you.

The options at a glance

Two different things hide behind “Google Shopping API”. One is a tool for merchants to send their own products to Google. The other is a product search API that returns what a shopping search shows for any query, and only that one gives you competitor prices. This table covers both, as read on 23 October 2026.

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

What Google really offers (and what it shut down)

Google has three things with “Shopping” in the name, and none of them is a free way to read competitor prices. Here they are in order of age.

The Search API for Shopping: closed in 2013

This is the one you are probably imagining. In December 2010 Google introduced the Content and Search APIs for Shopping and announced the retirement of the older Base API. The Search API let developers build shopping apps on Google’s product search data.

In March 2013, in its “second spring of cleaning” post, Google wrote: “We’re deprecating our Search API for Shopping” and “We’ll shut the API down completely on September 16, 2013.” We found no replacement from Google.

The Content API for Shopping: sunset on 18 August 2026

This is what people mean by “Google content API shopping”. It never returned search results. It let a merchant upload products, manage inventory and handle Merchant Center accounts by code.

Google’s deprecation page says the API “officially reached its sunset on August 18, 2026”. From 1 September 2026, requests without an approved extension “begin intermittently failing with HTTP 410 Gone”. Full decommissioning is set for early 2027, and the page says that timing may change. Extensions do not run past that date.

The Merchant API: for your own account

The Merchant API is described as “a new, simplified API designed to help you manage your Merchant Center accounts”. Its products service creates, reads, updates and deletes products in your own product inventory. The pages we read print no price for it.

It also has a reports service with views for product performance, pricing, market data and the competitive landscape. Google says it is “only available for standalone and individual sub-accounts”. We did not use it, so we cannot say how much of a competitor’s catalogue it shows. It needs a Merchant Center account of your own, and it is not an open “search any product” endpoint.

Free product listings: free for sellers

Google’s free listings let the products you sell “appear at no cost” on Search, Maps, YouTube, the Shopping tab, Images and Lens. That is useful if you sell things. It gives you no data about other sellers, and Google says it does not guarantee your products will be shown.

So the answer to “is there a free Google Shopping API?” is: free for managing and showing your own products, yes; free for reading what a shopping search returns, no. For that second job you need a third-party API. Our comparison of Google Shopping APIs covers the paid market in depth, and our free Google SERP API guide does the same for plain web search.

The free tiers of shopping data APIs

Every vendor below gives away a little so you can test. Read the fence before you plan around it, because it decides whether the free plan is usable at all.

Checked 2026-10-23 on each vendor’s own pricing page.

Do the arithmetic on the biggest free plan. SerpApi’s 250 searches a month is about eight a day. Tracking 100 products once a day is 3,000 calls a month, twelve times that. Treat these plans as a way to check the JSON before you pay.

There is also the do-it-yourself route: free scraper scripts that fetch Google Shopping pages directly. We did not test any, and the next section covers the running costs. Our Python guide to Google Shopping prices shows how that route compares with an API call. For the legal side, check Google’s terms and your own counsel.

What free really costs you

Free suits a weekend project. For a price feed that someone relies on, it hides six costs.

1. Quotas that are really trials. The free plans above give you 10 to 2,500 calls, and two of them do not say whether they renew. A trial that runs out in a day cannot run a daily price check.
2. Terms you have to find. SerpApi, SearchApi, HasData, Zenserp, Scrapingdog and Serper do not state commercial-use terms on the pricing pages we read. DataForSEO’s page says the JSON can be used in your own product. Read each vendor’s terms before you ship on a free plan.
3. Blocks and breakage on the do-it-yourself route. A script that fetches Google Shopping pages meets CAPTCHAs, blocked requests and layouts that change without notice. When the parser breaks, your price feed has a hole in it.
4. Missing prices. Not every product listing shows a price, a rating or a review count. Any shopping API, ours included, has rows where those fields are empty, so plan for it in your code.
5. Different row counts. SerpApi documents that every Shopping request returns the first page of about 40 items, and that num does not change the count. Serpent lets you ask for 1 to 100 rows, treats it as a ceiling, and says so when a short answer comes back. Compare what you get, not only what you pay.
6. No one to ask. DataForSEO prints “24/7 human support” on its Shopping page, which is worth weighing when a price feed goes quiet at night.

Here is a worked example, as arithmetic and not a measurement. Say you watch 500 products once a day, which is 15,000 Shopping calls a month. On Serpent at the Default rate that is 15,000 × $0.00035 = $5.25. SerpApi’s Production plan covers exactly 15,000 searches for $150. HasData, Scrapingdog and Zenserp are $49, $40 and $49.99 for their smallest plans that fit. An hour of fixing a broken parser costs more than the Serpent bill.

Near-free Google Shopping APIs, one by one

“Near-free” here means pay-as-you-go prices of cents or dollars per 1,000 calls, or a small monthly plan, for an API that returns product search results. Each option gets the same checklist: price, free tier, what it returns, watch-outs, best for.

Serpent

• Price: $0.35 per 1,000 Shopping calls at the Default tier, with no monthly plan. A one-time $100 deposit moves you to $0.32 per 1,000 (Growth) and $500 to $0.25 (Scale). The deposit is spendable balance, not a fee. The minimum first deposit is $10, and once lifetime deposits reach $50, later top-ups have a $100 minimum (DataForSEO, by comparison, asks for a $50 top-up). All four engines cost the same within a tier. On our pricing page, deposited credits never expire; promotional bonus credits expire after 30 days.
• Free tier: 10 free calls on signup, shared across services, plus one free demo run a day on the Shopping API page.
• What you get: GET /api/shopping with engine=google, yahoo (the default), ddg or brave. Every row has position, title, price as shown, a numeric extracted_price, currency, store, link, thumbnail, rating, review count and a sponsored flag, plus shipping, delivery, availability, condition, badges, variants and product ID fields. Check the docs for each engine’s field names. You set a 2-letter country and language, and num from 1 to 100. One call is one charge whatever num you send.
• Watch-outs: a value the listing does not show comes back as null or an empty list, so not every row has a price. num is a ceiling, not a promise, and a short answer says so in a delivery block. There are no price filters, no sort option and no page parameter. Default accounts allow 100 calls a minute and 10,000 a day. The free allowance is small.
• Best for: price monitoring and product research at a per-call price you can forecast.

SerpApi

• Price: $25 a month for 1,000 searches, $75 for 5,000, $150 for 15,000, $275 for 30,000, $725 for 100,000 and $3,750 for 1 million. The page prints plan prices, not a per-1,000 rate.
• Free tier: 250 searches a month, limited to 50 an hour.
• What it returns: a dedicated Google Shopping API with position, title, product_id, source, price, extracted_price, rating, reviews, thumbnail and delivery.
• Where it beats us: it documents filters we do not have: min_price, max_price, sort_by, free_shipping, on_sale and small_business. Cached and failed searches do not count against your total.
• Watch-outs: a fixed monthly bill, and about 40 items a page whatever num says.

SearchApi

• Price: $40 a month for 10,000 searches ($4 per 1,000), $100 for 35,000, $250 for 100,000, $1,500 for 1 million, and $1 per 1,000 at 5 million. Only successful searches are charged, and usage is capped at 20% of a plan’s credits per hour.
• Free tier: 100 free requests, no card. The page does not say whether that is one-off or monthly.
• What it returns: a google_shopping engine with position, title, seller, price, rating, reviews, delivery, thumbnail, plus offers and instalment details, and a page parameter. Its docs do not say how many results a page holds.

DataForSEO

• Price: its Google Shopping API charges $0.001 per product on the standard queue (up to 45 minutes) and $0.002 per product on the priority queue (about a minute). A query returns at most 120 products. That is $1.00 per 1,000 products on standard.
• Free tier: $1 in free credits, no card. The minimum top-up is $50, credits do not expire, and there is no subscription.
• What it returns: title, price, currency, seller, product ID, rating, review counts, delivery details and rank, plus separate reviews and sellers endpoints. Its FAQ says the data can be used commercially in your own product.
• Watch-outs: billing is by product, not by call, so a 100-row answer costs 100 units. Its FAQ also says products are “billed per 40 results”, which does not match the per-item table, so confirm the unit before you budget.
• Best for: scheduled batch monitoring where a 45-minute wait is fine and you want seller and review data.

HasData

• Price: $49 a month for 20,000 Shopping requests ($2.46 per 1,000), $99 for 100,000 ($0.99), and $208 for 300,000 ($0.69).
• Free tier: 1,000 credits a month, which its Shopping row shows as 100 requests, no card.
• Watch-outs: credits per call vary by tool, and we did not read its Shopping field list.

Scrapingdog

• Price: its Google Shopping API costs 10 credits a request. Lite is $40 a month for 200,000 credits (20,000 requests, $2 per 1,000), Standard $90 for 1 million credits (100,000 requests, $0.90) and Business Plus $1,000 for 19 million (1.9 million requests, about $0.53). Annual billing is ten months for twelve, and failed requests are refunded.
• Free tier: 100 credits, no card, which is 10 Shopping requests. We did not read its Shopping field list.

Zenserp

• Price: $49.99 a month for 25,000 searches ($2.00 per 1,000), $149.99 for 100,000 ($1.50), $499.99 for 500,000 ($1.00) and $899 for 1,000,000 ($0.90). Annual billing takes 20% off.
• Free tier: 50 searches a month, but Shopping is marked not included on Free, so you cannot test it without a paid plan.

Serper

• Price: credit packs from $50 for 50,000 credits ($1.00 per 1,000) to $3,750 for 12.5 million ($0.30), valid for 6 months. Shopping is a listed search type, but the page does not say what a Shopping call costs in credits.
• Free tier: 2,500 free queries, no card.

We left out Bright Data and Oxylabs: neither pricing page we read mentions Google Shopping. Our best Google Shopping API comparison covers them.

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

A monthly bill is what you pay, not a per-1,000 headline. This table shows one month of Shopping calls on the cheapest published plan that covers the volume. The sums are ours, not a vendor quote.

Checked 2026-10-23. Serpent Growth needs a one-time $100 deposit and Scale $500; the deposit is spendable balance. Growth and Scale are printed as $0.32 and $0.25 per 1,000; the table uses the exact per-call rates of $0.000315 and $0.000245. *DataForSEO bills per product, so the row assumes 10 products a call at $0.001 each; its FAQ’s “per 40 results” wording could make it lower. Vendors count one request as one search.

How each column was built: Serpent is calls multiplied by the published Shopping rate. For the others we took the cheapest published plan with enough searches in a month. SerpApi’s Developer plan holds 5,000, so 10,000 needs Production. HasData’s largest published plan is 300,000 requests. Scrapingdog needs 10 million credits for 1 million requests, which means Business Plus.

One Serpent limit to plan around: a Default account allows 10,000 calls a day. A steady 1 million calls a month is about 33,000 a day, so it needs the higher allowance that comes after $500 of total deposits, which is also the Scale rate.

The price claim needs care. At every volume in the table, Serpent’s Default rate of $0.35 per 1,000 is lower than the effective per-call price of every plan we read, and that is at full use of the plan. The comparison changes only at very large volumes. Scrapingdog’s per-1,000 price for Shopping falls below $0.35 only above roughly 25 million requests a month. Serper’s largest pack is $0.30 per 1,000 credits, but we could not confirm what a Shopping call costs there. Custom and enterprise plans publish no price, so they are not counted.

At the very top, the picture flips. Scrapingdog’s largest plan covers 110 million Shopping requests a month, which works out to about $0.27 per 1,000 on monthly billing and about $0.23 on annual billing. The annual figure is below our $0.25 Scale rate, so if you buy at that scale, get quotes from both. Below it, the table is the honest picture. For how credits behave when you do not use them all, see our guide to SERP APIs with a free tier and low minimums.

How to choose

• You sell products and want them on Google. Use Merchant Center free listings and the Merchant API. No data API is needed.
• You only want to try the JSON shape. Use any free plan above. SerpApi’s 250 searches a month is the largest we could verify for Shopping.
• A price feed, a repricing tool or a client report. A paid, documented API with a price per call you can forecast. This is where Serpent is the pick on the numbers above, if the fields listed here are what you need.
• You need price filters or sort order in the request. SerpApi documents them; our endpoint does not have them, so you would sort on your side.
• You need seller lists, reviews and a scheduled batch. DataForSEO’s separate sellers and reviews endpoints, if you can wait up to 45 minutes on the standard queue.
• You want the Yahoo, DuckDuckGo or Brave product view too. The same endpoint takes engine=yahoo, ddg or brave at the same price. See our Yahoo Shopping API comparison.
• You track more than Google Shopping. See our free-API guides to Google web search, Amazon and eBay.

Quick start: Google Shopping results in one request

Send your key in the X-API-Key header. This call asks for Google Shopping products for a query, in the US:

curl "https://apiserpent.com/api/shopping?q=sony+headphones&engine=google&num=10&country=us" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

In Python, listing the priced products from cheapest to dearest:

import os
import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://apiserpent.com/api/shopping",
    params={"q": "sony headphones", "engine": "google", "num": 10, "country": "us"},
    headers={"X-API-Key": os.environ["SERPENT_API_KEY"]},
    timeout=60,
)
data = resp.json()
if not data.get("success"):
    raise SystemExit(data.get("message"))

# extracted_price is None when the listing shows no price
priced = [p for p in data["results"]["shopping"] if p["extracted_price"] is not None]
priced.sort(key=lambda p: p["extracted_price"])
for p in priced:
    print(p["extracted_price"], p["currency"], p["title"], p["source"], p["link"])

A response looks like this, shortened and with illustrative values. Every key is always present, and a value the listing did not show is null.

{
  "success": true,
  "query": "sony headphones",
  "type": "shopping",
  "engine": "google",
  "country": "us",
  "results": {
    "shopping": [
      {
        "position": 1,
        "title": "Sony WH-1000XM5 Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones",
        "link": "https://www.example-store.com/sony-wh-1000xm5",
        "source": "Example Store",
        "price": "$329.99",
        "extracted_price": 329.99,
        "currency": "USD",
        "thumbnail": "https://www.example-store.com/images/wh-1000xm5.jpg",
        "product_rating": 4.7,
        "product_reviews": 2143,
        "sponsored": false
      }
    ],
    "totalResults": 10
  }
}

Send format=simple for a lighter row. The full parameter list is in the API docs, and you can run the same call in the playground first. Our price monitoring playbook and Google Shopping field study show what to do with the rows once you have them.

Moving over from another API, or from the Content API

• From the Content API for Shopping: this is not a drop-in replacement. The Content API wrote your own products to Merchant Center, and that job moves to the Merchant API. Our endpoint is read-only: it searches and returns product rows.
• From SerpApi: your query goes in q, SerpApi’s gl maps to country and hl to language. SerpApi calls the rating and review count rating and reviews; on engine=google Serpent uses product_rating and product_reviews. The price filters have no match, so filter in your own code.
• Price fields: use extracted_price for a number and price for the listing’s own text. Handle null for both, and cache repeated queries so you do not pay twice.

Limits and what we could not verify

• We found no free official product search API. That means we found none. We cannot prove a private programme does not exist.
• The Merchant API pages list no fee and we did not read its quota page. We did not test its reports.
• Some terms were not on the pages we read. Commercial-use terms are missing from the pricing pages of SerpApi, SearchApi, HasData, Zenserp, Scrapingdog and Serper. We could not read Serper’s Shopping credit cost, or any Shopping rate for Bright Data and Oxylabs.
• Units differ. A “request”, a “credit”, a “search” and a “product” are not the same size across vendors, and result counts per call differ. We compared the vendor’s own unit, not rows returned.
• Unclear units and renewals. DataForSEO’s table says per item and its FAQ per 40 results. SearchApi and Scrapingdog do not say whether their free allowance repeats.
• No benchmarks. We make no claim about speed, coverage, price accuracy or result quality for any service, including ours. Test our endpoint on your own queries and countries before you build on it.
• Prices move. All figures were read from public pages on 2026-10-23; verify them again before you buy.

FAQ

Is there a free Google Shopping API?

Not for reading product results. Google shut its Search API for Shopping on 16 September 2013, and its Content API for Shopping only manages your own products. Free listings and the Merchant API are free for sellers. To read what a shopping search shows, the options are small vendor free tiers and low-cost pay-as-you-go APIs.

Is the Google Content API for Shopping still working?

It is being switched off. Google says it reached its sunset on 18 August 2026, and from 1 September 2026 requests without an approved extension intermittently fail with HTTP 410 Gone. Full decommissioning is planned for early 2027, and extensions do not run past it. Google tells developers to move to the Merchant API.

What replaced the Content API for Shopping?

The Merchant API. Google calls it the new version of the Content API for Shopping, and it manages your Merchant Center accounts and products. It is not a product search API, so it does not replace a tool that reads competitor prices. The pages we read print no fee for it.

Can I get competitor prices from the Merchant API?

Not as a general product search. Its products service works on your own inventory. Its reports service has pricing, market data and competitive landscape views, but Google limits it to standalone and individual sub-accounts, and we did not test it. For arbitrary queries you need a shopping search API.

What is the cheapest Google Shopping API?

On rates published on 2026-10-23, Serpent charges $0.35 per 1,000 Shopping calls with no plan, $0.32 after a one-time $100 deposit and $0.25 after $500. Every rival plan we priced came to more than $0.50 per 1,000 calls even at full use, up to about 2 million calls a month. Only far larger volumes change that.

Is a free Google Shopping scraper a good idea?

It is free to start and costly to keep running. Scripts that fetch Google Shopping pages meet blocks, CAPTCHAs and layout changes, and the work of fixing them falls on you. We did not test any. Check Google's terms and your own counsel before you build a product on one.

Sources

• Google: Content API for Shopping deprecation and sunset
• Google: Merchant API quickstart, products overview and reports overview
• Google Merchant Center: free product listings
• Google: A second spring of cleaning (Search API for Shopping)
• Google Developers Blog: New Shopping APIs and deprecation of the Base API
• SerpApi pricing and SerpApi Google Shopping API
• SearchApi pricing and SearchApi Google Shopping docs
• DataForSEO Google Shopping API
• HasData pricing
• Scrapingdog pricing
• Zenserp pricing
• Serper