The pricing is so different between these:

ceramic.ai - $0.25 per 1,000 requests

Exa - $7.00 per 1,000 requests

Linkup - $5.00 per 1,000 requests

Does anyone have insights on the quality differences? Web search API pricing for AI agent usecases has always felt so expensive for what it is, but I have no grounding on the economics of running a web index.

EDIT: formatting

I recently tried a bunch of web search APIs. Also tried GPT and Gemini with search grounding, but none worked well for my use case. You can see some good comparisons and benchmarks at https://mattcollins.net/web-search-apis-for-llms and https://openbenchmarks.com

https://serper.dev/ is $1 per 1,000

They have 2,500 free which I used, it seemed good.

I'm unaffiliated--actually a clanker told me about it so I told it "go ahead"

i looked up what alternatives there'd be and openrouter also makes its search API available. it's exa too, but $4 per 1000 results.

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