SerpApi pricing starts with a free plan of 250 searches a month, and paid plans run from $25 a month for 1,000 searches to $3,750 a month for 1,000,000. You pay a flat monthly fee for a fixed allowance of successful searches, whether you use it all or not.
If your volume is small or uneven, that flat fee is most of your bill. On Scrape.ly you pay per Google results page instead: $0.003 a page, $3.00 per 1,000, and you can start on a free plan with $5 of credit every month. This guide lists every SerpApi plan, explains how searches, throughput and speed modes are billed, works through the cost of 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 searches on both, and shows a real run from 22 October 2026.
Prices checked on 22 October 2026 on serpapi.com/pricing.
SerpApi pricing: every plan
SerpApi sells monthly plans, billed month to month. Each plan includes a number of searches per month and an hourly throughput, which SerpApi defines as "the guaranteed number of successful searches per hour for your plan." The last column is our arithmetic: the plan price divided by its searches, so it only holds if you use the whole allowance.
| Plan | Price per month | Searches per month | Throughput per hour | Cost per 1,000 at full use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 250 | 50 | $0 |
| Starter | $25 | 1,000 | 200 | $25.00 |
| Developer | $75 | 5,000 | 1,000 | $15.00 |
| Production | $150 | 15,000 | 3,000 | $10.00 |
| Big Data | $275 | 30,000 | 6,000 | $9.17 |
| Searcher | $725 | 100,000 | 20,000 | $7.25 |
| Volume | $1,475 | 250,000 | 50,000 | $5.90 |
| Infrastructure | $2,750 | 500,000 | 100,000 | $5.50 |
| Cloud 1M | $3,750 | 1,000,000 | 110,000 | $3.75 |
Above Cloud 1M, SerpApi lists Cloud plans in steps of one million searches, up to 54 million a month. Production and higher plans add SerpApi's U.S. Legal Shield, and ZeroTrace mode and priority support start at Cloud 1M. For enterprise or custom volume, SerpApi asks you to email its team.
How SerpApi bills searches
Five rules decide what you actually pay.
- One search per successful response. SerpApi counts only successful searches. Cached, errored and failed searches don't count. The number of results doesn't matter either: a response with 100 results and an empty one both count as one search.
- The fee is flat. You pay the plan price every month. A month with 100 searches on Starter still costs $25.
- Throughput can force a bigger plan. Starter allows 200 searches an hour, Developer 1,000. If a nightly job has to finish 2,000 searches in an hour, you need Production (3,000 an hour) even if your monthly total fits a smaller plan.
- Running out means renewing early. When the allowance is used up, you can renew manually or turn on Automatic Early Renewal. Either way, your searches are "fully replenished" and your renewal date moves. In practice, a second batch of searches in the same month costs the full plan price again.
- Plan changes. Upgrades charge the difference, downgrades keep your renewal date and move leftover searches to an "Extra Credits" balance, and you can cancel any time. SerpApi refunds within 7 days of subscribing unless you've used more than 20% of the searches.
What SerpApi costs: three worked examples
The examples below use SerpApi's published plans and Scrape.ly's Google Search Scraper, which charges $0.003 per Google results page. One page holds up to 10 results, so one SerpApi search maps to one Scrape.ly page for a standard 10-result query.
Scrape.ly also bills a little platform usage (compute and storage) per run. Our real one-page run below added $0.00029 of usage to its $0.003 page fee. The examples show page fees; plan on usage on top.
1,000 searches a month
- SerpApi: the Starter plan, $25. The allowance is exactly 1,000, so a month with 1,001 searches means an early renewal or the $75 Developer plan.
- Scrape.ly: 1,000 pages × $0.003 = $3.00. That fits inside the Free plan's $5 monthly credit, with $2 left for platform usage.
In page fees, Scrape.ly costs 12% of SerpApi Starter here ($3 ÷ $25), and the free credit covers them.
10,000 searches a month
- SerpApi: Developer covers 5,000 searches, so you need Production at $150 (15,000 searches). Developer plus one early renewal costs the same: 2 × $75 = $150.
- Scrape.ly: 10,000 × $0.003 = $30.00. On a paid plan the monthly price turns into the same amount of credit, so this is, for example, the Starter plan ($19 of credit) plus $11 of additional credit.
That's 20% of SerpApi's price ($30 ÷ $150), and the 5,000 searches you'd leave unused on Production aren't paid for.
100,000 searches a month
- SerpApi: the Searcher plan, $725 for exactly 100,000 searches at up to 20,000 an hour.
- Scrape.ly: 100,000 × $0.003 = $300.00, for example the Scale plan's $199 of credit plus $101 of additional credit.
Scrape.ly comes to 41% of the SerpApi bill ($300 ÷ $725), a saving of $425 a month, or $5,100 a year.
| Monthly searches | SerpApi plan | SerpApi | Scrape.ly page fees | Scrape.ly as share of SerpApi |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | Starter | $25 | $3.00 | 12% |
| 10,000 | Production | $150 | $30.00 | 20% |
| 100,000 | Searcher | $725 | $300.00 | 41% |
Extra costs to plan for
The plan price isn't always the whole bill. These items come straight from SerpApi's pricing page:
- Speed modes multiply the price. Every plan can run in Best Effort (1×), Ludicrous Speed (2× the base price) or Ludicrous Speed Max (4×). Production at Ludicrous Speed costs $300 a month instead of $150.
- Early renewals. Each one costs a full plan price and resets your billing date.
- Unused searches. The fee is the same at 10% use as at 100%. If your volume swings from month to month, you pay for your peak every month.
- Throughput headroom. A job that bursts needs a plan sized for its hourly peak, not its monthly total.
- Privacy features at the top end. ZeroTrace mode, which keeps SerpApi from storing your queries and results, starts at Cloud 1M ($3,750 a month).
SerpApi vs Scrape.ly pricing
Scrape.ly is a web data platform with a Store of 568 ready-made scrapers (Actors), a cloud runtime, an API and an MCP server for AI agents. Google results come from the Google Search Scraper, priced per page. Here's how the two compare on the things that move a SERP budget:
| Scrape.ly | SerpApi | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | $0.003 per Google results page | Monthly plan with a fixed number of searches |
| Price per 1,000 results pages | $3.00 at any volume | $25.00 on Starter, $10.00 on Production, $7.25 on Searcher, at full use |
| Minimum monthly spend | $0 on the Free plan; paid plans from $19, all of it usable credit | $25 for any paid plan |
| Free allowance | $5 credit a month, about 1,600 pages in page fees | 250 searches a month |
| Volume between plan sizes | You pay for the pages you fetch | You pay for the next plan's full allowance |
| Running out mid-month | Buy additional credit on a paid plan; the page price stays $0.003 | Early renewal at the full plan price |
| Spending cap | Maximum charge per run; the run stops when it reaches it | Allowance and hourly throughput |
| Beyond search results | Crawl the pages behind the results with other Store Actors | Search engine results |
For SEO and research teams, the last row matters as much as the price. A rank tracker often needs the pages behind the results too. On Scrape.ly the same account runs the Website Content Crawler on the ranking URLs at $0.0005 per crawled page, and returns them as clean text and Markdown. The full feature comparison is on the Scrape.ly vs SerpApi page.
A real run: one Google results page for $0.0033
We ran the Search Google, 10 results preset on 22 October 2026 for the query "web scraping" in the US. It saved one results page with 9 organic results in 3.482 seconds, and the run was charged $0.003287:
| Charge | Amount |
|---|---|
| SERP page fee (1 × $0.003) | $0.003000 |
| Compute | $0.000232 |
| Key-value store writes | $0.000050 |
| Dataset writes | $0.000005 |
| Total | $0.003287 |
The console excerpt:
2026-10-22T15:23:14.486Z [scrapely.actor] INFO Using fast search mode. Pages switch to browser mode only if fast search mode fails.
2026-10-22T15:23:14.493Z [scrapely.actor] INFO queries=1 concurrency=8
2026-10-22T15:23:14.909Z [scrapely.actor] INFO Pushed 1 dataset items, 9 organic results, 0 failed pages in 0.4s. …
2026-10-22T15:23:14.909Z [scrapely.actor] INFO [Status message]: 1 pages, 9 organic results, 0 failedThe same item also carried 8 related searches. The Google Search scraping tutorial walks through every field and the sample output.
To run the same search from your code, create a token under Settings → API & Integrations and call the synchronous endpoint. One page takes a few seconds, well inside its 45-second wait:
curl -X POST "https://api.scrape.ly/v2/actors/querystone~google-search-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SCRAPELY_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"queries": "web scraping", "maxPagesPerQuery": 1, "countryCode": "us", "languageCode": "en", "resultsPerPage": 10}'Put one query per line in queries to check a whole keyword list in one run. For big lists, use the Python or Node client, which waits for the run however long it takes. Set a maximum charge when you start a run (see Run Actors) and it stops at that amount.
AI agents can do the same over MCP. Add https://api.scrape.ly/mcp to Claude, Cursor or VS Code (see the MCP docs) and ask: "Use scrapely to run querystone/google-search-scraper for 'web scraping' in the US, one page, and give me position, title and URL."
FAQ
How much does SerpApi cost per search?
It depends on the plan and how much of it you use. At full use, a search costs $0.025 on Starter ($25 for 1,000), $0.01 on Production and $0.00375 on Cloud 1M. If you use half your allowance, each search costs twice that. On Scrape.ly a Google results page costs $0.003 at any volume, plus a little platform usage.
Does SerpApi have a free plan?
Yes. The Free plan includes 250 searches a month at up to 50 an hour, with no charge. Scrape.ly's Free plan gives you $5 of credit every month with no credit card, which covers about 1,600 Google results pages in page fees.
What happens when you run out of SerpApi searches?
SerpApi doesn't sell single extra searches. You renew early, by hand or with Automatic Early Renewal, which replenishes your searches, moves your renewal date and charges the plan price again. Or you upgrade and pay the difference.
What is the cheapest SERP API for small projects?
For low or uneven volume, the cheapest option is one with no monthly minimum, because a flat fee dominates small bills. Scrape.ly's Google Search API charges $0.003 per results page from a prepaid balance, so 1,000 searches cost $3.00 and fit inside the free monthly credit.
Serper vs SerpApi: how do they bill?
Serper sells prepaid credit packs for Google search, from $50, and its credits are valid for six months. It offers 2,500 free queries. SerpApi sells monthly subscriptions with a searches allowance and an hourly throughput. Scrape.ly has no pack to pre-buy: you pay per page from your balance and can start on the free monthly credit.
What are the best SerpApi alternatives?
If you want Google results priced per page instead of per plan, Scrape.ly is the strongest alternative: $3.00 per 1,000 pages, structured JSON with positions, People Also Ask and related searches, plus 568 other Actors and an MCP server on the same account. See the Scrape.ly vs SerpApi comparison for the details.
