October 14, 2026
Tavily pricing · what 10,000 lookups really cost
Tavily charges in credits, and advanced search costs 2. At 10,000 lookups a month, basic search costs $78 and advanced costs $140. Pick by depth.
The short answer
Tavily is fairly priced for small AI agents that want ready text. If you only need Google results, SearchApi costs less. If you need full pages at volume, Firecrawl costs less per page.
Tavily is a search API. An API is the way your own code asks another service for data. Tavily returns text from web pages that is ready to hand to an AI model. This is called LLM-ready text.
The plans
Tavily charges in credits. A credit is the unit Tavily counts for each call, per Tavily's credits page.
| Plan | Credits a month | Price a month | Per credit | | --- | ---: | ---: | ---: | | Researcher | 1,000 | Free | | | Project | 4,000 | $30 | $0.0075 | | Bootstrap | 15,000 | $100 | $0.0067 | | Startup | 38,000 | $220 | $0.0058 | | Growth | 100,000 | $500 | $0.005 | | Pay as you go | any | | $0.008 |
Pay as you go means you buy credits one at a time as you use them, with no plan.
What each call costs in credits
Basic search costs 1 credit. Advanced search, which digs deeper for better answers, costs 2.
Extract reads the text of pages you name. Basic extract costs 1 credit per 5 pages that work, and advanced extract costs 2 per 5. Failed pages are free.
Map lists the pages on a site. It costs 1 credit per 10 pages. A crawl is a map plus an extract, so it reads a whole site.
So basic extract is the cheap part of Tavily. Searching costs more than reading.
What 10,000 lookups a month cost
Take an account-research agent that runs 10,000 lookups a month. Prices are from October 14, 2026.
The math for basic search: 10,000 credits. Project $30 covers 4,000, and 6,000 × $0.008 = $48 more, so $78. That beats Bootstrap at $100.
The math for advanced search: 10,000 × 2 = 20,000 credits. Bootstrap $100 covers 15,000, and 5,000 × $0.008 = $40 more, so $140. That beats Startup at $220.
The math for basic search plus basic extract of the top 5 pages: 1 + 1 = 2 credits a lookup, so 20,000 credits and the same $140.
The math for advanced search plus advanced extract: 2 + 2 = 4 credits a lookup, so 40,000 credits. Startup $220 covers 38,000, and 2,000 × $0.008 = $16 more, so $236.
So flipping the default from basic to advanced takes the bill from $78 to $140.
Going over a plan is not a cliff
Pay as you go is $0.008 a credit, a little more than Project's $0.0075.
The math for 16,000 credits: Bootstrap $100 + 1,000 × $0.008 = $108. Price that before you jump to Startup at $220.
When SearchApi or Firecrawl costs less
SearchApi returns Google results as data, like links and snippets. Developer is $40 for 10,000 searches, per SearchApi's pricing.
Firecrawl reads full pages into clean text. A search of 10 results costs 2 credits, and each page costs 1, per Firecrawl's pricing.
The math on Firecrawl for search plus 5 pages: 2 + 5 = 7 credits a lookup, so 70,000 credits for 10,000 lookups. Standard covers 100,000 credits for $83 a month billed yearly.
When to stay on Tavily
Stay on Tavily if you run a chat agent under 4,000 calls a month and want short ready text. Project at $30 covers that.
As a Tavily user, I think the pricing is already reasonable.
What to do this week
Count your lookups for a week, decide basic or advanced, then multiply by four.
- If your chat agent runs under 4,000 calls a month, stay on Tavily Project at $30.
- If you only need Google links at 10,000 or more searches, use SearchApi.
- If you need full pages at volume, try Firecrawl's free plan with 1,000 credits.
Start SearchApi's 100 free searches.
Next · Firecrawl vs Tavily prices one job on both · Web search APIs compares more tools.