From the field
What people actually struggle with
From roughly 180 Reddit and X posts read in August 2026. The X half was almost entirely promotion; Reddit carried the signal, and thirteen posts from four confirmed vendor rings were excluded, including one account running the same question through three scraping subreddits with a different persona each time. These five are organic.
An agent search API and a SERP API are not the same product
“My current take is that most “search APIs” are really context providers for LLM grounding.” r/AI_Agents, 2 points
What this page can do about it: This was the most useful distinction in the whole research pass, and it decides whether this page is for you. Tools that return cleaned passages for a model to read are solving grounding. The rows here return the result set itself, in order, with the domains that hold each position. If you need to know who ranks where, cleaned context will not tell you, and if you only need something true to quote, you are overpaying here.
There is no pay as you go, and that is the objection
“What bothers me mostly is that there's no pay-as-yo-go option for SerpAPI or Firecrawl as far as I can tell.” r/TypingMind, 3 points
What this page can do about it: The complaint that came up most often was about the shape of the bill rather than the size of it: a monthly plan is the wrong instrument for someone running twenty searches a day. Every row here is charged per call from a prepaid balance, at the provider's own rate with nothing added, so the honest counterpoint is that at that volume the price differences between providers are noise and the real cost is your setup time.
Google stopped serving a hundred results on one page
“The removal created a 10x increase in the workload for data collection.” r/AgentsOfAI, 204 points
What this page can do about it: This is the single best explanation of why a cheap looking per search rate can still surprise you. When one fetch stopped returning a hundred results, reading the top hundred became ten fetches, and every provider passes that through somewhere: as depth billed in tens, as rows, or as ten separate searches. Read the unit column above before the price column.
The free tier runs out before the project starts
“APIs like SerpAPI have pretty limited free tiers, so I'm looking into alternative ways to handle search without running into those limits.” r/Playwright, 2 points
What this page can do about it: A new treg.to team starts with a dollar of prepaid balance and no card, which at these rates is hundreds of searches rather than a fortnight of a trial. What that does not buy you is a decision: the same dollar spread across three of these providers on your own queries is a better answer than any table, and it is the experiment this page would rather you ran.
Every thread on this question is full of vendors
“please be understandable and provide your take, examples and opinion, not just straight up promo bs” r/ProxyEngineering, 10 points
What this page can do about it: This page is one of those threads, so the only decent thing it can do is show its working. Every price above is read from the provider's own rate card or documentation on the date in the row, where a provider publishes no dollar price the row says so rather than guessing, and any reliability figure comes from live treg.to traffic rather than a benchmark we designed. What no comparison can tell you is which of these companies still exists in eighteen months. Nobody selling you a table knows that either.
