Best recurring free tiers: SERPdive — 1,000 credits/month, no card, extracted answer-ready content; Tavily — 1,000 credits/month, snippet-style; Firecrawl — 1,000 scraping credits/month; SerpAPI — 250 SERP-JSON searches/month. One-time: Serper, 2,500 queries. Card-required: Brave, $5 monthly credit. “Free Google API” is 100 queries/day of Custom Search links; DuckDuckGo has no official web search API.
The whole landscape, one table
| Free amount | Renews? | Card? | Results are | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SERPdive | 1,000 credits (≈1,000 Mako searches) | Monthly | No | Extracted, answer-ready content |
| Tavily | 1,000 credits (÷2 for advanced) | Monthly | No | Snippets; raw content optional |
| Firecrawl | 1,000 credits (scraping meter) | Monthly | No | Scraped pages; search 2 cr/10 results |
| SerpAPI | 250 searches | Monthly | No | Full SERP JSON |
| Serper | 2,500 queries | One-time | No | Google SERP JSON |
| Brave | $5 credit (≈1,000 requests) | Monthly | Yes | Links + snippets, own index |
| Exa | Trial credits | One-time | No | Neural results; contents billed |
| Google Custom Search | 100 queries/day | Daily | No | Links from a custom engine |
Reading the fine print: the three shapes of “free”
- Monthly allowances are the only free tiers that support an ongoing project. A hobby agent doing ~30 searches/day fits inside 1,000/month indefinitely.
- One-time trials are evaluation budgets, not tiers. Serper's 2,500 queries are generous for exactly one purpose: deciding whether to pay.
- Free-with-card is a pricing funnel with a $0 first invoice. Nothing wrong with it — Brave's $5/month covers ~1,000 requests — but it is not “no strings”.
The hidden cost inside free links
A free tier that returns links transfers the expensive part to you: fetching pages, stripping boilerplate, truncating to fit a context window, paying your LLM to read whatever survived. If the free searches feed a model, what matters is model-ready content per free search — which is the metric SERPdive's free tier is built to win, and the one we benchmark in public:
- Agent / RAG side project → SERPdive or Tavily (monthly, model-ready-ish, no card). Compare their outputs on your queries — both free tiers make that a zero-cost experiment.
- SEO / rank tracking experiments → SerpAPI's 250/month or Serper's one-time 2,500.
- Site ingestion → Firecrawl's 1,000 monthly scraping credits.
- Learning / classroom demos → anything without a card requirement.
No card, renews monthly, full extracted content — the free tier designed for agents, not for collecting payment details.
Get your free API keyFrequently asked questions
Is there a completely free web search API?
For real volume, no — running search infrastructure costs money, so “free” means a free tier. The practical winners are recurring monthly allowances: SERPdive and Tavily both give 1,000 credits every month (SERPdive without a card), Firecrawl gives 1,000 scraping credits monthly, SerpAPI 250 searches monthly. One-time trials (Serper's 2,500) run out; scraping DuckDuckGo's HTML endpoints breaks terms and breaks randomly.
Is the Google Search API free?
Only barely. Google's Programmable Search (Custom Search JSON API) allows 100 queries per day free, then $5 per 1,000 up to a 10k/day hard cap — and it searches a custom engine you configure, not full Google, with results limited to links and snippets. It has been in maintenance mode for years. For agent workloads it is a dead end; that is why this page exists.
Does DuckDuckGo have a free search API?
No official one. Its “Instant Answer” API returns topic summaries, not web results, and the unofficial libraries that scrape DuckDuckGo's HTML violate its terms and break whenever markup changes. Fine for a weekend hack, not for anything users depend on.
What is the catch with free tiers?
Three usual ones: a card requirement (Brave asks for one even on free), one-time rather than monthly credit (Serper), or results that are links you still have to fetch and parse — spending your own compute and LLM tokens to finish the job. Check all three lines in the table before picking.
Which free tier is best for an AI agent or RAG project?
The one whose free results are already model-ready. SERPdive's 1,000 monthly credits return extracted, answer-ready content (quality benchmarked in public: 60.7% of decided blind duels vs Tavily default search, 20.2% fewer tokens) with no card — for a hobby agent doing ~30 searches a day, that is simply free forever.