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Why teams choose Blopus.

Web search for LLM agents, over an index we own, at a price you can cap. The table below puts our published rates beside the alternatives so you can check the numbers yourself — every competitor figure comes from that vendor’s own pricing page and is date-stamped.

The short version

Owning the index is the whole argument

Price is easy to compare. The expensive question is what happens when the index underneath your vendor disappears — and that is not hypothetical.

Microsoft permanently retired the Bing Search APIs on 11 August 2025, announced on 12 May 2025, giving roughly three months’ notice. Every product that resold Bing lost its source at once, and reported replacement costs ran 40% to 483% higher. That is documented history, not a sales line.

Blopus runs its own crawlers and builds its own index. Ranking, freshness and coverage are ours to change, your queries are never handed to another search engine, and there is no third party who can take the product away from you or reprice it overnight.

Capability and cost, side by side.

Capability Blopus.ai Brave Search API Tavily Exa Serper / SerpAPI
Not reselling or scraping Google or Bing, so it will not suddenly break, throttle, or hike prices on you. Brave and Exa run their own indexes. Tavily describes crawling and indexing at scale but we could not confirm whether search is served from an index they own, so we have left it unverified.
✓✓n/v✓—
Returns clean, ready-to-read text with links, not messy raw web pages your model has to untangle. Brave, Tavily and Exa all build for agents too. The Google resellers hand back raw SERP data.
✓✓✓✓—
Your agent can read and quote the actual article, instead of guessing from a one-line preview.
✓—✓✓—
Drop into Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, or any agent over MCP with no custom code. Brave, Tavily and Exa publish official MCP servers too, so this is table stakes rather than something only we do. The Google resellers do not.
✓✓✓✓—
Ready-made configuration for 63 agents, editors, frameworks and local runtimes, from Claude Code, Cursor and OpenClaw to n8n, LangChain, Ollama and oMLX. Most of these connect over MCP, which is an open standard, so this is about how much setup we have already written for you rather than something only we can do.
63 toolsn/vn/vn/vn/v
One predictable monthly price; hit your cap and calls pause — a runaway agent can never run up a bill.
✓———~
Always know where you stand, and get emailed at 50% and 75% before your calls pause at the cap. Every vendor here has a usage dashboard; we have not verified which of them send proactive alerts, so they are marked not verified rather than guessed at.
✓n/vn/vn/vn/v
Image search✓ (beta)✓n/vn/vn/v
Cost per 1,000 searches$1.65–2.33$5$8$7Serper $0.30–1
SerpAPI $9–25
Starts at$7/mofree tier, $5 credits/mofree tier, then usagefree tier, $10 credits/moSerpAPI $25/mo

Key:✓ full  ·  ~ partial or varies by tier  ·  — not offered  ·  n/v not verified by us.

What you would actually pay each month*

A cost per 1,000 tells you very little on its own. This is the real monthly bill at the three volumes Blopus sells, at each vendor's own published list price****.

Provider 3,000 searches 15,000 searches 60,000 searches How it is billed
Blopus.ai** annual $7 $29 $99 Flat plan, hard cap, no overage
Blopus.ai** monthly $9$35$119 Flat plan, hard cap, no overage
Serper***———No monthly plan. Prepaid top-ups only, and credits expire after 6 months. Resells Google
SerpAPI***———Subscription tiers that do not line up with these volumes. Resells Google
Brave Search API$15$75$300$5 per 1,000, usage based
Perplexity$15$75$300$5 per 1,000, usage based
Exa$21$105$420$7 per 1,000. Page contents billed separately
Tavily$24$120$480$8 per 1,000 pay as you go

A bill you can predict

If a bug makes your agent retry and it runs ten times its expected volume for a month, that is $3,000 to $4,800 at their list rates. Blopus protects you against that, because your calls pause at the cap and we email you at 50% and 75% first. A runaway agent can cost you a service outage. It cannot cost you a car.

Why Serper and SerpAPI show a dash

They are a different product: both resell Google's results rather than running an index, and neither sells a monthly plan at these volumes, so there is no like-for-like monthly price to put in the column. Serper sells prepaid credit packs from $50 that expire after 6 months, so a full year of cover means buying at least twice, $100 a year, against $84 a year for Blopus Hobby.

The trade is independence and speed. Serper's own FAQ says queries return in 1 to 2 seconds, and 2 to 4 seconds when they have to retry against Google. That tail exists because the request is being proxied to someone else's search engine. Blopus answers from its own index in about 130 ms server side. Across the range they publish that is 7 to 31 times faster: 1 to 2 seconds is their normal case, 2 to 4 seconds is when they retry. For an agent making five searches in a row that is the difference between well under a second and five to twenty seconds of waiting. Both numbers are each vendor's own published figure, measured server side and excluding your network, and neither is a head to head benchmark we ran. And in August 2025 Microsoft shut down the Bing Search APIs with roughly three months of notice, which is what depending on someone else's index can look like.

What you get for the difference.

Same published numbers as the table, read one vendor at a time.

Against Brave Search API

Brave’s Data for Search tier is $5.00 per 1,000 queries. Blopus is from $1.65 on annual billing — roughly a third of the cost for the same thousand searches.

You also get full-page fetch out of the same credit pool rather than as a separate line item, and an MCP server your client can point at without you writing an integration.

Against Serper

Serper publishes $0.30–$1.00 per 1,000, but it is not a subscription: it sells prepaid credit packs from $50 and the credits expire after six months. A full year of cover means buying at least twice — $100 a year against $84 for Blopus Hobby. It also charges 2 credits for 11–100 results where the first ten cost one.

And it resells Google’s results rather than running an index. Serper’s own FAQ quotes 1–2 seconds per query, and 2–4 seconds when it has to retry — the tail you inherit when a request is proxied to someone else’s search engine. Blopus answers from its own index in about 130 ms.

Against Tavily

Tavily is $8.00 per 1,000 ($0.008 per credit), and advanced search costs 2 credits — so the effective rate doubles on the setting most agents want.

Blopus is roughly a quarter of the base rate, with no setting that silently doubles it, and returns full page text through fetch from the same pool.

Against Exa

Exa is $7.00 per 1,000 searches, and page contents are billed separately at $1 per 1,000. Two meters instead of one.

Blopus bills search and fetch from a single pool at from $1.65 per 1,000, and that pool is hard-capped, so the bill is the plan price and nothing else.

Against SerpAPI

SerpAPI runs $9.17–$25.00 per 1,000 depending on tier ($25/mo for 1,000, $75 for 5,000, $150 for 15,000, $275 for 30,000). That is 4x to 15x the Blopus rate for web results an agent will read, and it is a Google reseller rather than an index owner.

Against Perplexity’s Search API

Perplexity publishes $5.00 per 1,000 for the Search API and $2.50 for the web_search tool — two to three times the Blopus rate, tied to one provider’s stack.

Blopus is model-agnostic: a REST API, an MCP server, and SDKs for Python and JavaScript. Nothing about it assumes which model you run.

Moving over takes an afternoon

There are two endpoints, so there is not much to port. search takes a query and returns ranked results; fetch takes a URL and returns the extracted page text. If your client speaks MCP there is no integration to write at all — point it at our server and the tools appear. There are SDKs for Python and JavaScript, LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations, and per-client setup guides for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, LM Studio, Cursor, OpenCode and more.

Licensing, in plain terms

  • Personal plans cover your own work. Commercial use is included — use Blopus in your job, your freelance work and your own projects. What a personal plan does not cover is putting our results in front of other people.
  • Your login and API keys are yours alone. They are your credentials: do not share them, hand them on, or sell them. Issuing several keys is for separating your own apps, environments and budgets — a key is a credential, not a license, so holding more of them never widens what your plan permits.
  • If an organization is the customer, that is a business plan. Not because of how many of you there are — we do not count heads or charge per seat — but because the agreement then sits with the company rather than with you personally.
  • If our results reach third parties, that is a business plan. Shipping Blopus inside a product, a service or a client deliverable is a right business plans grant and personal plans do not, however small the operation.
  • Reselling the API or redistributing the index is never included. That needs a separate written agreement at any tier — tell us what you need and we will put one in place.

The Terms of Service are the binding version.

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Need more than 60,000 searches a month, invoicing and POs, custom terms, or a resale agreement? Tell us what you need and we will reply within one business day.

Questions we get before you switch.

No. Blopus runs its own crawlers and builds its own index. Your queries are never passed to another search engine, and no upstream vendor can deprecate the product out from under you — which is exactly what happened to every Bing reseller in August 2025.
On annual billing Blopus is $1.65–$2.33 per 1,000 searches on a personal plan, and $2.80–$3.98 on a business plan, which adds the right to put results in front of your own users. Published rates elsewhere: Brave $5.00, Perplexity $5.00, Exa $7.00 plus $1.00 per 1,000 for page contents, Tavily $8.00 with advanced search costing two credits, SerpAPI $9.17–$25.00. Every one of our plans, personal or business, is a lower rate than any vendor running its own index.
No. Blopus is flat-rate and hard-capped. Calls pause when you reach your plan limit and we email you at 50% and 75% beforehand. There is no overage and no usage invoice — buy a one-time top-up if you need more this month.
No — we do not charge per seat or count heads. What decides your license is who the customer is and who sees the results. A personal plan covers your own work, including commercial work you do yourself, and your login and keys are yours alone — they cannot be shared, transferred or sold. If an organization is the customer, or if Blopus results reach your app’s users or your clients, that is a business plan. Reselling the API or redistributing the index needs a separate written agreement at any tier — tell us what you need. The Terms of Service are the binding version.
We crawl continuously across the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific, adding millions of new pages a day over web, news and image search. Freshness and date filters are documented on the search endpoint page.