Brave Search API vs Serpex (2026): which should you pick?

Pick Brave Search API if

• Fits if you're grounding an AI chatbot in current web results without scraping Google
• Works for apps moving off Google's Custom Search JSON API

Look elsewhere if

• Skip it if you need Google or Bing rankings, as results come only from Brave's index
• Watch out: a credit card is needed to sign up, even for the free monthly credit
• Watch out: storing results or training models on them needs a plan with storage rights
• Tight if you need volume, at 50 requests a second on Search and 2 on Answers before Enterprise
• Pricey if you use Answers, at $4 per 1,000 queries plus $5 per million tokens each way

Pick Serpex if

• Fits if you're building a RAG pipeline that needs the page text behind each result
• Works for uneven workloads, since prepaid credits never expire

Look elsewhere if

• Skip it if you need Google rankings, since you can't pick the engine, country or device
• Watch out: a search with page content costs up to 6 credits for 10 results, and Stealth Mode 5
• Watch out: every top-up is shown against a crossed-out price, such as $5 against $10
• Tight if you want a refund, which runs 7 days and only with no more than 20% of the credits used

Brave Search API

• Usage is billed from prepaid credits: Search is $5 per 1,000 requests, and Answers $4 per 1,000 queries plus $5 per million input and output tokens.
• Spellcheck and Autosuggest cost $5 per 10,000 requests, and storing results or training models on them needs a plan with storage rights.
• Results come only from Brave's index, so it does not report what ranks on Google or Bing.
• Capacity is 50 requests per second on Search and 2 on Answers; more needs an Enterprise agreement.

Serpex

• You cannot choose the search engine or set a country or device: every query is auto-routed, so it does not report what ranks on Google for a location.
• Search and extraction cost 1 credit each; a search with page content costs up to 6 credits for 10 results, and Stealth Mode 5 credits.
• Failed requests are free; refunds run 7 days on credit purchases with no more than 20% of the credits used.

Brave Search API

Brave's own index

Every result comes from Brave's crawler and ranking, informed by opt-in signals from Brave users, with no fallback to Google or Bing for any query.

LLM Context endpoint

Returns ranked, extracted page content for a model to answer from, sized from 1k to about 33k tokens, with a relevance threshold and a URL and timestamp per source.

Web, news, image, video and places

The Search plan covers human-readable web results plus news, images, videos and location-aware places with map data, under one API key.

Goggles and richer results

Goggles rerank results and limit them to chosen sites; up to five extra snippets per result and schema-enriched results with added metadata.

Answers endpoint

Writes answers grounded on one or several searches, with citations and streaming, through an interface compatible with the OpenAI SDK.

Privacy and security

Brave says queries are never shared or used for training, retention is zero by design, and the service is SOC 2 Type II attested.

Serpex

Web search API

Ranked results with title, URL, snippet and position, with site:, -site: and before:/after: date operators typed into the query.

Search with page content

Ask for the top 5 or 10 pages to be fetched and returned as markdown with the results, billed only for the pages delivered.

Extract API

Pull clean, readable content from any list of URLs at one credit per URL, cleaned up for vector databases and RAG pipelines.

Stealth Mode

Render JavaScript-heavy pages in a full browser on Extract requests, at five credits per successful request.

Automatic routing and retries

Every search goes to whichever source is healthy, with fallback to another source and retries if one is slow or down.

SDKs and MCP server

TypeScript and Python SDKs, an MCP server and LangChain examples, plus a playground and usage analytics in the dashboard.

Brave Search API

• Free monthly credits$0

  $5 of credit a month on each of Search, Answers, Spellcheck and Autosuggest; usage beyond it is drawn from prepaid credits.

• EnterpriseCustom

  Custom terms, capacity and endpoints, full-funnel zero data retention, NDAs, invoicing and enterprise support. Sold through sales.

Serpex

• Starter$5

  one-time top-up, used as you go ($0.80 per 1,000 credits)

  $5 buys 6,250 credits, and top-ups from $5 to $49 get this rate; 5 requests a second. Shown against a crossed-out $10.

• Standard$50

  one-time top-up, used as you go ($0.65 per 1,000 credits)

  About 77,000 credits for $50, for top-ups from $50 to $499; 25 requests a second. Shown as 19% off a crossed-out $100.

• Scale$500

  one-time top-up, used as you go ($0.50 per 1,000 credits)

  About 1 million credits for $500, for top-ups from $500 to $1,999; 50 requests a second. Shown as 38% off a crossed-out $1,000.

• EnterpriseCustom

  For $2,000 and up: custom rate limits, SLAs and priority support, from $0.20 per 1,000 searches at 10M+ searches a month.