Free Video Search API in 2026: What's Free, What Isn't

You searched for a free video search API, so here is the straight version. Nothing gives away an API that searches videos across the whole web. Microsoft shut its Bing one in 2025, Google publishes none, and what is still free is narrower than the name suggests.

We read every official page below on 2026-10-23 and did the maths ourselves. We did not run benchmarks or trial any competitor's product, so there are no speed or success-rate numbers here. Where a page did not print a figure, we say “not verified” instead of guessing.

The options at a glance (read 2026-10-23)

One row per option. “Free” is what you get before paying anything. Paid rates are per 1,000 searches, taken from each vendor's own page.

Two questions hiding in one search

“Free video search API” can mean two different jobs. Mixing them up is why many lists on this topic are confusing.

1. Search one catalogue. You want videos from YouTube, or free stock footage, inside your own app. The platforms publish their own APIs for that, and some are free.
2. Search the web for videos. You want the ranked list a search engine shows when someone types “how to tie a tie” and clicks Videos. That list mixes YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok and news sites. This is what rank trackers, content teams and AI tools usually need.

The first job has free answers with firm limits. The second has none that are free for real work, only small allowances and low per-search prices. The rest of this guide takes them in that order.

What happened to the Bing Video Search API

Microsoft's lifecycle notice says the Bing Search APIs were retired on August 11, 2025. Existing instances were decommissioned, and the product is “no longer available to be used or new customer signup.” The notice does not list each API by name, but The Register's report describes the retired family as covering “image, video, news, and web search.”

Microsoft still hosts the old Bing Video Search overview, last updated in 2022. It describes a Video Search API, a Trending Video API and a Video Insights API. You can no longer sign up to call any of them.

Microsoft points customers to Grounding with Bing Search, which feeds web data to an AI agent. That is a different product from a list of ranked videos, and we explain the gap in our free Bing SERP API guide. If you used Bing's video API before, the realistic replacement is one of the paid video result APIs below.

Is there a free Google video search API?

Google publishes no API for its video results page that we could find. Its Custom Search JSON API is the nearest thing, and Google's own page says it returns “web search or image search results,” gives 100 free queries a day, and is “closed to new customers.” Existing customers have until January 1, 2027 to move.

What exists instead is a set of third-party APIs that return Google's video results as JSON. Bright Data, SerpApi, SearchApi, Serper, Scrapingdog and ScrapeBadger all sell one, and each has a small free allowance. We compare them below. For Google web results rather than video, see our free Google SERP API guide.

YouTube's API: free, but only YouTube

If every video you need lives on YouTube, the official route is the YouTube Data API v3. It is free to use inside a daily quota, and it is the only fully official route in this guide.

The quota, as Google states it today

Google's quota page, last updated 2026-10-15, says projects get “a default quota allocation of 100 search.list calls, 100 videos.insert calls, and 10,000 units per day combined for all other endpoints.” Search has its own bucket, and each call costs 1 unit. Every extra page of results is another call, and quotas reset at midnight Pacific Time.

Many guides still describe the older model: a 10,000-unit pool where each search costs 100 units. The result for search is similar, about 100 searches a day, but check the page above before you trust any blog, including this one. Google also says the default is “subject to change.”

What one call returns

The search.list reference lets you ask for up to 50 results per call. You can filter by type (video, channel or playlist), by duration (under 4 minutes, 4 to 20, over 20), by definition, by upload date and by order, including view count.

Where it stops

• 100 searches a day. A rank tracker that checks 100 keywords once a day uses the whole allowance. At that pace 10,000 searches take 100 days.
• More quota is by application. Google's getting-started page sends you to a quota extension request form. We found no price list for extra quota.
• One platform. It cannot tell you which Vimeo, TikTok or news-site video ranks for a keyword on a search engine.
• Rules on the data. Google's developer policies say stored data must be deleted or refreshed within 30 calendar days in the standard case, and that pages showing YouTube content must make clear YouTube is the source. They also bar scraping YouTube applications. Read them before building a stored dataset.

Need a YouTube-only search at API prices instead? Our best YouTube API providers post compares them, and the free YouTube search API guide goes deeper on that one platform.

Pexels, Pixabay, Dailymotion and Vimeo

These are real, free and official, and they search only their own shelves. That makes them right for “find a stock clip for my app” and wrong for “which videos rank for this keyword.”

Pexels Videos API

Pexels' documentation says the API is rate-limited “to 200 requests per hour and 20,000 requests per month” by default, and that if you meet its terms “you can get unlimited requests for free.” Video search is /v1/videos/search with a required query plus orientation, size, locale and paging up to 80 per page. Pexels asks you to show a prominent link back to it with every use.

Pixabay Videos API

Pixabay's docs allow 100 requests per 60 seconds per API key. They ask you to cache requests for 24 hours, credit Pixabay when you show results, and not send “lots of automated queries.” Search covers Pixabay's own videos, with filters for type, category, minimum size and order.

Dailymotion

Dailymotion's developer site documents API v2 for authentication, uploads, managing videos, players and livestreams. The guides we read list a profile's videos with date filters, and cap one result series at 1,000 videos. We could not confirm a keyword search across Dailymotion's public catalogue, so check its reference before you plan around one.

Vimeo

Vimeo's developer pages rendered as an empty shell for our reader, so we could not verify its search endpoint or free limits. Its help centre says limits are counted per minute, and that going over returns a 429 and a block of up to one minute.

The near-free video result APIs, one by one

This is the group that answers “search the web for videos.” Serpent comes first because, on the rates below, its video rate is the lowest published one we could verify. We publish this post, so judge the table, not the order. Where a rival wins, we say so.

1. Serpent API

• Free: A free account gets 10 free calls, shared across all services, with no card. You also get one free demo run a day on the Video Search API page without signing up. That is small. Bright Data's 5,000 and Serper's 2,500 are far larger for pure testing.
• Paid: Video search at /api/videos is $0.10 per 1,000 calls on Default. A single $100 deposit moves new credit to $0.09 (Growth), and a single $500 or $1,000 deposit to $0.07 (Scale and Enterprise). The engine never changes the rate, so Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Brave cost the same on the pricing page.
• Commitment: The first deposit is $10 minimum, which buys 100,000 Default video calls by our arithmetic. There is no monthly subscription, and deposited credits do not expire.
• What you get back: The same eleven fields on every row: position, title, URL, duration, source host, views as a number, thumbnail, description, publisher, embed URL and publish date as YYYY-MM-DD. Missing values are null, never missing keys. Filters cover freshness and safe search on every engine, duration and resolution on DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Bing, plus 112 country codes.
• How many videos: num goes up to 100, but it is a ceiling, not a promise. The docs list roughly 60 videos delivered at num=100 on Google and about 50 on Brave.
• Watch out: The 10-call free pool runs out in minutes. Default allows 100 requests a minute and 10,000 a day. SearchApi also returns channel names and key moments, which Serpent's eleven fields do not include.

Cheapest? We will not claim it flat out. Serpent's $0.10 Default and $0.07 floor are the lowest published video rates we could price at any volume. The lowest rival rate we could price was Scrapingdog's $0.1364, and only on a $30,000-a-month plan. We could not price ScrapeBadger's subscriptions or Oxylabs' video rate, so they are open questions.

2. Bright Data Google Videos API

• Free: Its Google Videos page lists 5,000 requests a month and says no credit card is required.
• Paid: $1.50 per 1,000 requests pay as you go, charged only for successes. The Scale plan is $499 a month with 380,000 requests, then $1.30 per 1,000. The page says there is “no special price for Google Videos API.”
• Best for: The largest renewing free allowance for Google video results that we read, and a sensible path to enterprise volume.
• Watch out: The pay-as-you-go rate is 15 times Serpent's Default video rate.

3. Serper

• Free: Serper offers 2,500 free queries and no card.
• Paid: Packs run $50 for 50,000 credits ($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.
• Videos: Its page lists a Videos search type with a sample response. It does not say how many credits a video query uses, so we assumed one in our cost table.
• Watch out: Prepaid packs that expire are the opposite of credits that never do.

4. SearchApi

• Free: The pricing page offers 100 free requests on sign-up, no card.
• Paid: $40 a month for 10,000 searches ($4 per 1,000), $100 for 35,000 ($3), $250 for 100,000 ($2.50), $500 for 250,000 ($2) and $1,500 for 1 million ($1.50). The ladder ends at $1 per 1,000 for 5 million.
• Fields: Its Google Videos docs list length, source, date, channel and key moments with timestamps, plus filters for duration, quality and captions.
• Watch out: The page says you can use only up to 20% of your plan's credits each hour.

5. SerpApi

• Free: The pricing page lists a free plan of 250 searches a month, with 50 successful searches guaranteed per hour.
• Paid: $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. Cached searches are not counted.
• Videos: The Google Videos API page lists position, title, link, thumbnail, snippet, duration and upload-age fields.
• Watch out: It is a monthly subscription, and its price per search at low volume is the highest in this guide.

6. Scrapingdog and ScrapeBadger

Scrapingdog prices its Google Videos API at 5 credits a request. Its Lite plan is $40 a month for 200,000 credits, which is 40,000 requests, or $1.00 per 1,000 by our division. Its free plan has 100 credits, which is 20 video searches a month.

ScrapeBadger charges 20 credits per successful request, returns up to 10 videos each, and gives 1,000 free credits with no card. Its pricing page sells pay-as-you-go credits from $10 at $0.15 per 1,000 credits. That works out to $3.00 per 1,000 video searches, by our division. Its subscription rates were not readable, and the page notes new credit costs since October 15, so recheck before you buy.

7. Brave Search API, Oxylabs and DataForSEO

Brave's Search plan is $5 per 1,000 requests with $5 of free credit every month, and it asks for a card. It documents a separate video search endpoint with count up to 50 and a freshness filter. The pages we read did not say which plan includes it. We cover Brave in our free Brave Search API guide.

Oxylabs lists Google video results and a $5 welcome credit. Its public table shows Google rates from $1.00 per 1,000 results but not a video-specific rate, so it is not in our cost table. DataForSEO's YouTube SERP API is $0.60 per 1,000 blocks of 20 on the standard queue, but that is YouTube only, and we did not find a Google Videos endpoint on its API list.

Our best video search API providers post goes deeper on units and what each product searches.

What free really costs you

Your time

A daily or monthly allowance forces you to build quota tracking and a plan for the day it runs out. YouTube's resets at midnight Pacific, so your scheduler has to know that.

Hourly and per-minute ceilings

Free plans carry short-window limits. SerpApi's free plan guarantees 50 successful searches an hour, SearchApi lets you use 20% of plan credits per hour, and Pixabay allows 100 requests a minute. A monthly allowance you can only spend slowly is a slow allowance.

Terms and rules

YouTube's policies limit how long you can store data. Pexels and Pixabay require credit to the source. For any provider, read the terms you accept. If you plan to collect search results yourself, check the search engine's terms of use and your own counsel first. We are not giving legal advice.

Maintenance and support

Result pages can change layout without notice, and a home-built parser breaks when they do. A free allowance has no support line. For a prototype that is fine. For a rank tracker your customers rely on, it is not.

Cost at 1K, 10K, 100K and 1M calls

This is arithmetic from the published rates above, for one video search per call, per month. We ignored free allowances, tax and extras. Where a vendor sells plans or packs, we used the cheapest plan or pack combination that covers the volume.

How to read it

• The Serpent tier rows assume you made the single qualifying deposit for that tier. Credits do not expire, so you are not forced to burn them in a month. Enterprise's $0.07 video rate equals Scale's, even though its web rate is lower.
• The Bright Data Scale figure is $499 plus 620,000 extra requests at $1.30 per 1,000.
• Serper's 100,000 is two $50 packs and its 1,000,000 is two $375 packs. Scrapingdog's rows use its Lite ($40), Standard ($90) and Premium ($350) plans, which cover 40,000, 200,000 and 1.2 million requests at 5 credits each.
• Subscription plans (SearchApi, SerpApi, Scrapingdog) cost the same whether you use all the quota or not, which is why they look expensive at 1,000 calls.
• Units differ. One Serpent call can return up to 100 videos as a ceiling, while ScrapeBadger returns up to 10 per request. We did not find per-request result counts for every vendor, so compare cost per call, then check what a call returns.
• SerpApi, SearchApi and Brave pages do not say video calls cost the same as ordinary searches. We assumed they do.
• For perspective, Bright Data's 5,000 free requests a month are worth $0.50 at Serpent's Default rate, and Serper's 2,500 are worth $0.25. A rank tracker checking 100 keywords every night is 3,000 calls a month, or $0.30 on Default.

Volume also meets rate limits. Serpent Default allows 10,000 calls a day, so 1,000,000 a month needs a higher tier or a custom allocation.

How to choose

• Everything you need is on YouTube and volume is small. Use YouTube's official API and its 100 free searches a day. Respect the storage rules.
• You need free stock clips. Use Pexels or Pixabay, and credit them. Neither tells you what ranks on a search engine.
• You want to try web-wide video results this afternoon. Take Bright Data's 5,000 or Serper's 2,500, and confirm the free quota works on the video endpoint in your own account. Our 10 free calls cover a quick look.
• You need video results in a product at the lowest unit price. Serpent at $0.10 Default, or $0.07 after a $500 deposit. Work out whether your volume justifies the deposit.
• You want a predictable monthly invoice. SerpApi or SearchApi. You pay for the quota whether you use it or not.
• You track video ranks. Read our video competitor monitoring guide and the free rank tracking API guide.
• You also need images. See the free image search API guide.

Quick start and migration

Moving to Serpent is one URL and one header. This is the call from the API docs:

curl "https://apiserpent.com/api/videos?q=react+hooks+tutorial&engine=google&country=us&num=20" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

And the same call in Python:

import os
import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://apiserpent.com/api/videos",
    params={"q": "react hooks tutorial", "engine": "google", "country": "us", "num": 20},
    headers={"X-API-Key": os.environ["SERPENT_API_KEY"]},
    timeout=60,
)
data = resp.json()
if not data.get("success"):
    raise SystemExit(data.get("message"))

for v in data["results"]["videos"]:
    print(v["position"], v["duration"], v["views"], v["publishedTime"], v["title"], v["url"])

Run it once in the playground first if you would rather see the JSON before writing code. Add freshness=m to ask for videos from the past month. On engine=ddg, yahoo or bing you can also add duration=long for long videos. Use format=simple if you only need position, title, URL and duration. Our Python tutorial and video search API tutorial go through the details.

What to change when you move

• From the retired Bing call: swap the endpoint, send an X-API-Key header instead of a subscription key, and read results.videos.
• From another SERP API: map your fields to the eleven above. views is already a number and publishedTime is already a date, so any string parsing can go.

Limits and unknowns

• We did not test competitors. Every competitor figure is from its published page on 2026-10-23. Prices and allowances change, so treat the numbers as dated.
• Free tiers and the video endpoint. We could not confirm that the free requests at Bright Data, SerpApi or SearchApi apply to their video endpoint in every account. Check before you build.
• Credit costs. Serper, SerpApi, SearchApi and Brave do not state a separate video price on the pages we read, so the cost table assumes one billed unit per call.
• Dailymotion and Vimeo. We could not verify keyword search or limits for either.
• Oxylabs and ScrapeBadger subscriptions. No comparable rate was readable, so they are absent from the cost table.
• Serpent is an interested party. We wrote this post. The arithmetic is simple enough to redo against the linked pages.
• Results differ by country and day. Whatever API you pick, test your own keywords and markets first.

FAQ

Is there a free video search API?

Not one that searches videos across the web. The free ones cover a single catalogue: YouTube's API gives 100 searches a day, Pexels allows 20,000 requests a month, and Pixabay 100 requests a minute, each over its own library. Web-wide video results need a paid API with a small free allowance.

Is there a free Google video search API?

Google publishes none for its video results. Its Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers and returns web or image results. Third-party APIs return Google's video results as JSON, with free allowances from 100 to 5,000 requests, then paid rates.

Is the YouTube Data API free?

Yes, within a quota. Google's page says each project gets 100 search.list calls a day by default, at 1 unit each in a separate bucket, and quotas reset at midnight Pacific. It searches YouTube only. More quota is requested through a form, and we found no price list.

What replaced the Bing Video Search API?

Nothing equivalent. Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on August 11, 2025 and points customers to Grounding with Bing Search for AI agents. For ranked video results as data, the options are the third-party video result APIs in this guide.

How much does a video search API cost per 1,000 searches?

On the pages we read, Serpent charges $0.10 on Default and $0.07 on Scale and Enterprise. Scrapingdog works out to $1.00 on its $40 plan, Bright Data is $1.50 pay as you go, ScrapeBadger $3.00, SearchApi from $4 and SerpApi from $25. Units differ, so check what one call returns.

Can I use Pexels or Pixabay to search videos across the web?

No. Both search only their own libraries of free stock footage. Pexels asks for a prominent link back, and Pixabay asks you to cache results for 24 hours and credit the source. They suit stock clips, not rankings.

Sources (all read 2026-10-23)

• Google: YouTube Data API quota cost
• Google: YouTube Data API getting started
• Google: search.list reference
• Google: YouTube API Services developer policies
• Google: Custom Search JSON API overview
• Microsoft: Bing Search APIs retiring on August 11, 2025
• Microsoft Learn: Bing Video Search API overview (legacy)
• The Register: Microsoft set to pull the plug on Bing Search APIs
• Pexels API documentation
• Pixabay API documentation
• Dailymotion developer documentation
• Vimeo Help Center: rate limits
• Bright Data: Google Videos API
• Serper: pricing and free queries
• SearchApi: pricing
• SearchApi: Google Videos API docs
• SerpApi: pricing
• SerpApi: Google Videos API
• Scrapingdog: pricing
• ScrapeBadger: Google Video Scraper API
• ScrapeBadger: pricing
• Brave: Search API plans
• Brave: video search documentation
• Oxylabs: Google video results
• DataForSEO: YouTube SERP API pricing

Related reading on Serpent: free Google SERP API guide, SERP APIs with a free tier and low minimums, free Bing SERP API.