# Valyu, free: Web search API

> Ranked results with full-text excerpts from web and proprietary sources

Valyu's web search API on its Free plan. It costs $0.00 per 1,000 searches. It returns 4 of the 6 key fields we check: Date, Author, Text, Summary.
The cheapest of the 177 plans we rank by price is [Ceramic, $99 monthly](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/ceramic/99-monthly/llms.txt), at $0.20 per 1,000 searches.
[Search1API](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/search1api/19-monthly-basic-post-search-search/llms.txt), [Firecrawl](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/firecrawl/top-up-from-5-pay-as-you-go-on-scale/llms.txt) and [Valyu](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/valyu/499-monthly/llms.txt) are the best web search API providers in our benchmark.

- This page: https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/valyu/free
- [Best web search API in 2026](https://datacircle.dev/best-web-search-api.txt)
- Get it: https://www.valyu.ai/pricing
- Request: `POST https://api.valyu.ai/v1/search`
- API key: with the plan, on https://www.valyu.ai/pricing
- Its API docs: https://docs.valyu.ai/api-reference/endpoint/search
- Sold by: Valyu (https://www.valyu.ai)
- Checked: 2026-10-27

## In the answer

- Completeness: 67%
- Date: ✓
- Author: ✓
- Text: ✓
- Summary: ✓

## Price

- $ per 1,000 searches: $0.00
- Per: call
- Billing: free

## Aggregators

- Aggregators: none

## Charges

- Most per search: 20
- Also pays for: from the same budget: Contents · Answer · DeepResearch

## Overage

- Units cap: hard

## Not found

- $ per 1,000: $0.00

## In their words

- Their pitch: Ranked results with full-text excerpts from web and proprietary sources

## Data

- Keep data: no retention period is set in its documentation for what the API answers, "You may temporarily cache Outputs only within the durations specified by Valyu's Documentation. You may not: Store Outputs indefinitely, Store Outputs in volumes sufficient to recreate datasets, Store large batches of outputs from related queries, Store Outputs outside the permitted cache window", "Restricted Content [...] You may not: Cache, Store, Retain, Log, Index, Reformat, Copy any Restricted Content. All Restricted Content must be discarded once the request completes", "Upon termination: you must delete all cached data"
- Use data: "use Outputs within your applications", "You may not: use any Output for model training, fine-tuning, pre-training, embedding generation, or dataset construction, use Output to recreate the structure of any Valyu dataset or publisher corpus, resell or sublicense Outputs", "You may not use the Services to: circumvent paywalls or access restrictions, recreate datasets or build a competing search/index service, scrape, bulk extract, or systematically harvest content, perform benchmark dumping or bulk export of Outputs, use in regulated decision-making (medical, legal, financial) without human oversight, conduct security testing without permission, violate copyright or intellectual property rights", "use Outputs returned by the Services, provided that any source attribution and/or citation to Valyu or it’s Partners is included in the Output and is displayed clearly. It will not be removed, obscured, or disabled within your service or product", "You may not: Develop search engines, RAG corpora, knowledge bases, embeddings, LLMs, datasets, indexes, or generative models that compete with Valyu, Use Outputs as seeds for synthetic data that replicates licensed or indexed content, Use Outputs to build evaluation datasets for model training without written permission", "You may not: Embed Outputs into a vector store, Create, augment, or curate datasets partially or wholly derived from Outputs, Generate synthetic corpora seeded by Outputs, Store Outputs or derivatives in structured or unstructured datasets"

## Plan

- Pay: $0
- You get: 1,600 credits
- Enough for: 3,200 calls
- Expires: 12 months after signup

## Speed

- Answer: in the call
- Median: 5.24 s

## The call

- You send: query. Optional: max_num_results, search_type, max_price, relevance_threshold, included_sources, excluded_sources, scope_policy, source_biases, instructions, category, is_tool_call, response_length, start_date, end_date, country_code, fast_mode, url_only, historical_cache, historical_cache_strict, include_abstracts, include_image_links, hls_coverage
- Method: POST
- Path: /v1/search

## About the plan

- Plan: Free
- Who can get it: anyone who is at least 16 years old, with a parent's or guardian's permission if under 18, and the legal authority to enter into the Platform Service Agreement

## The 40 fields the plan's answer can hold

success, transaction ID, query, result ID, page title, URL, page content, description, source, price, length, image URL, relevance score, data type, source type, publication date, crawl date, abstract, DOI, citation, citation count, authors, references, metadata, web result count, proprietary result count, total cost, total characters, warning type, warning message, warning detail, source scope policy, allowed dataset IDs, selected dataset IDs, completed dataset IDs, returned dataset IDs, omitted dataset IDs, selection basis, source scope coverage, exhaustive

## Valyu's plans (6)

- [Valyu, free](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/valyu/free/llms.txt): $0.00 per 1,000, 67% complete
- [Valyu, top-up from $10](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/valyu/top-up-from-10/llms.txt): $3.125 per 1,000, 67% complete
- [Valyu, $29 monthly](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/valyu/29-monthly/llms.txt): $2.90 per 1,000, 67% complete
- [Valyu, $99 monthly](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/valyu/99-monthly/llms.txt): $2.75 per 1,000, 67% complete
- [Valyu, $499 monthly](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/valyu/499-monthly/llms.txt): $2.495 per 1,000, 67% complete
- [Valyu, contact us](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/valyu/contact-us/llms.txt): 67% complete

## Valyu's calls (1)

- `POST /v1/search`: [Valyu, free](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/valyu/free/llms.txt)

## Valyu's APIs (1)

- [Valyu: web search API pricing, 6 plans](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/valyu/free/llms.txt)

## Valyu: web search API alternatives

- [Search1API, $499 monthly, Enterprise, POST /ask](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/search1api/499-monthly-enterprise-post-ask/llms.txt): $2.495 per 1,000, 33% complete, live
- [ContextFetch, top-up from $500, Pay as you go, +20% on top-ups from $500, POST /v1/search, Search, deep](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/contextfetch/top-up-from-500-pay-as-you-go-20-on-top-ups-from-500-post-v1-search-search-deep/llms.txt): $2.50 per 1,000, 50% complete, live
- [Sofya, top-up from $10, Pay as you go, POST /v1/search, Search, snippets](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/sofya/top-up-from-10-pay-as-you-go-post-v1-search-search-snippets/llms.txt): $2.50 per 1,000, 50% complete
- [browserfoundry, $100 pack, Scale Pack, POST /api/v2/search/fast](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/browserfoundry/100-pack-scale-pack-post-api-v2-search-fast/llms.txt): $2.50 per 1,000, 33% complete

## Sources

From each provider's own pricing page and docs, and from what providers tell us. We read this row from these pages on 2026-10-27.

- https://docs.valyu.ai/api-reference/endpoint/search
- https://docs.valyu.ai/api-reference/openapi.json
- https://docs.valyu.ai/api-reference/overview
- https://docs.valyu.ai/pricing
- https://www.valyu.ai/pricing
- https://www.valyu.ai/terms
- https://www.valyu.ai/valyu-acceptable-use-policy
- https://www.valyu.ai/valyu-platform-service-agreement