Web search MCP servers · what 10,000 searches cost

Pick Firecrawl if your assistant searches and then reads the pages it finds. Both jobs come out of one pool of credits, and Standard is $83 a month billed yearly for 100,000 credits.

Pick SearchApi if you need Google results and other engines, like Bing and YouTube, in one tool. Developer is $40 a month billed monthly for 10,000 searches.

Pick Perplexity if you only want the lowest price per search. Fast Search is $1 per 1,000 searches, pay as you go.

Pick Exa if search quality comes first. It tied for the top score on the Artificial Analysis test, and its free plan gives $10 of credit a month.

Pick Tavily if you want 1,000 free searches a month to test with, and no card.

Pick Brave if you want results from Brave’s own index, which doesn’t pass searches to Google or Bing. Search is $5 per 1,000 requests from prepaid credit, and Brave adds $5 of free Search credit a month.

MCP is the standard way for an AI assistant to use another tool. A web search MCP server lets the assistant send a search, get the results back and use them in its answer.

Some servers stop at search results. Firecrawl and Exa can also read a whole page and hand its text to the assistant.

OAuth means you sign in through a browser window, so you don’t paste an API key into a settings file. Firecrawl, SearchApi and Exa all let you connect this way.

The math: on October 22, 2026 prices, for 10,000 searches a month with 10 results each:

• Perplexity Fast Search: 10 × $1 = $10, pay as you go.
• SearchApi Developer: $40 a month billed monthly, which includes 10,000 searches.
• Exa Lite: 10 × $4 = $40, pay as you go. Exa’s free $10 a month brings it to $30.
• Brave: 10 × $5 = $50 from prepaid credit. Brave’s free $5 a month on Search brings it to $45.
• Tavily basic search: 10,000 credits × $0.008 = $80, pay as you go.
• Firecrawl: 10,000 × 2 = 20,000 credits. Hobby’s 5,000 credits are too few, so you need Standard at $83 a month billed yearly. That leaves 100,000 minus 20,000 = 80,000 credits, enough to read 80,000 pages.

For search alone, Firecrawl is the dearest pick here. It wins once your assistant also reads pages, because the reading comes out of the same plan.

Firecrawl and Exa let you start their servers with no account and no API key. Both cap that free use with rate limits.

Exa, Brave and Tavily give a free monthly allowance. Exa gives $10 of credit, Brave gives $5 of Search credit, and Tavily gives 1,000 credits.

Community servers on GitHub copy results from search engines like DuckDuckGo with no account at all. They are fine for a test. Nobody promises they will keep working.

Artificial Analysis runs every search tool with the same AI model and the same settings. On its board, with data from October 19, 2026, Exa’s auto search scored 80, tied with Perplexity’s medium setting, and Exa Lite scored 79. Firecrawl scored 73, and its row was measured on August 17, 2026.

Vals ran its own test on finance and legal research tasks, updated October 21, 2026. One Claude model scored 48.45% with Exa at $3.48 a task, against 46.94% at $4.37 a task with Claude’s own search. Vals didn’t test Firecrawl, SearchApi or Tavily.

The two tests disagree. Vals puts Keenable, another search tool, first, and Artificial Analysis puts Exa and Perplexity on top. Before you pay for a year, run 20 of your own questions through two servers and keep the one that gets more of them right.

Firecrawl lets you sign in through a browser, add an API key, or start with neither. Its Claude and ChatGPT connectors install in one click.

SearchApi recommends OAuth and also takes a token, a code you send with each request.

Exa’s server works with no API key at a limited rate, or with OAuth or an API key for your own plan’s limits.