Brave Search API

Independent web index search API

PaidSearch, vector & RAGbrave.com

What it is

Web search over Brave's own crawled index rather than a resold Google or Bing feed. Returns organic results, news, images and videos as structured JSON, with an Answers endpoint that generates a cited response. Enterprise plans offer full-funnel zero data retention.

Why it earns a slot

An independent index surfaces pages Google-derived APIs cannot, and the licensing is clean for AI grounding. It ships a first-party MCP server so agents can call it directly.

Know before you commit

The $5 monthly credit is roughly 1,000 Search requests and there is no free plan beyond it. Long-tail coverage is shallower than Google's index.

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Pricing snapshot

$5/month in free credits applied automatically; no standing free query allowance. Search $5 per 1K requests at 50 QPS. Answers $4 per 1K requests plus $5 per million input/output tokens at 2 QPS. Enterprise custom.

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Evaluate Brave Search API (https://brave.com/search/api/) for this project, then use it only if it fits what we are already building.
Context: Independent web index search API. Web search over Brave's own crawled index rather than a resold Google or Bing feed. Returns organic results, news, images and videos as structured JSON, with an Answers endpoint that generates a cited response. Enterprise plans offer full-funnel zero data retention.
Reviewer notes (general, not written for this codebase): An independent index surfaces pages Google-derived APIs cannot, and the licensing is clean for AI grounding. It ships a first-party MCP server so agents can call it directly.
Watch out for: The $5 monthly credit is roughly 1,000 Search requests and there is no free plan beyond it. Long-tail coverage is shallower than Google's index.
Pricing: $5/month in free credits applied automatically; no standing free query allowance. Search $5 per 1K requests at 50 QPS. Answers $4 per 1K requests plus $5 per million input/output tokens at 2 QPS. Enterprise custom.
Rules: treat the notes above as background only. Do not assume a theme, style, layout or feature that is not already in this project — inspect the existing code first and ask me before changing visual direction.

/api/public/tools/brave-search-api

Neighbourhood

How Brave Search API sits against the rest of the atlas — swaps, companions and the tools builders actually save alongside it.

Instead of thisFuse.js MiniSearch Pagefind Algolia Chroma Cloudflare Vectorize Elastic Cloud Exa Jina AI LanceDB

Also in Search, vector & RAG

Algolia

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Hosted keyword search API

Free tier + paidSearch, vector & RAG

Free: 10K search requests/mo + 50K records. Grow: $0.50 per 1K searches + $0.40 per 1K records (10K searches / 100K records included). Grow Plus $1.75 per 1K searches. Elevate with NeuralSearch is custom.

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Chroma

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Embedded vector DB + cloud

Free tier + paidSearch, vector & RAG

OSS free (Apache 2.0). Chroma Cloud Starter: $0/mo base with $5 free credits, then usage. Team $250/mo + usage with $100 credits. Rates: $2.50 per GiB written, $0.33 per GiB-month stored, $0.0075 per TiB queried, $0.09 per GiB returned.

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Cloudflare Vectorize

developers.cloudflare.com

Serverless vector DB on Workers

Free tier + paidSearch, vector & RAG

Workers Free: 5M stored vector dimensions, 30M queried dimensions/mo. Workers Paid ($5/mo): 10M stored and 50M queried included, then $0.05 per 100M stored dimensions and $0.01 per million queried dimensions.

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Elastic Cloud

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Managed Elasticsearch + vector

PaidSearch, vector & RAG

14-day free trial. Cloud Hosted from $99/mo Standard (120GB storage, 2 zones); Gold $114, Platinum $131, Enterprise $184. Serverless from $0.047 per GB retained/mo, $0.09 per search VCU-hour, $0.14 per ingest VCU-hour.

Open dossier