Tavily API review
Best search API for agents on a budget
POST https://api.tavily.com/search Authorization: Bearer $TAVILY_KEY # search_depth: basic → 1 credit, $0.008 # search_depth: advanced → 2 credits, $0.016 # auto_parameters may choose advanced for you
The Tavily API is web search built to be consumed by a language model. You send a query, it searches, and it returns results already shaped for a prompt rather than a page of links you would have to scrape. For a GTM agent that needs to know something nobody has put in a database, that is the whole job.
The pricing is the simplest in this directory. One credit for a basic search, two for an advanced one, and $0.008 a credit on pay as you go. The free tier is 1,000 credits a month with no credit card, resetting on the first of the month regardless of your billing date, and students get it free outright.
There is one trap and it is worth knowing before you write a line: Tavily can choose the expensive search depth for you, and by default it will when it thinks the query warrants it.
The rest of the category is in the Sourcing APIs listing.
What a call costs, and what quietly changes it
Credits are consumed by request type, and search depth is the parameter that moves the number. Tavily will return the credit cost in the response if you ask it to, which is the easiest way to audit your own usage.
| Request | Credits | At $0.008 a credit | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search, basic | 1 | $0.008 | The default depth, and the one to set explicitly. |
| Search, fast | 1 | $0.008 | Same price, lower latency. |
| Search, ultra-fast | 1 | $0.008 | Same price again. |
| Search, advanced | 2 | $0.016 | Deeper retrieval. Twice the cost. |
| Extract and crawl | varies | see docs | Tavily states heavier requests use more credits. |
| Research | varies | see docs | Limited to 20 requests a minute on every key. |
Three of the four search depths cost the same credit, so fast and ultra-fast are free speed-ups rather than a cheaper tier. The only decision that costs money is basic against advanced, and that is a 2x on every single call.
Tavily documents this plainly and it is still the thing people miss. With auto_parameters enabled, it configures the search for you based on the query, and search_depth may be set to advanced automatically when that is likely to improve results. Advanced is 2 credits rather than 1. Their own guidance is the fix: set search_depth to basic explicitly if you want to avoid the extra cost. Pass include_usage and the response tells you what each call actually spent.
Tavily API pricing, plan by plan
Tavily API pricing has four tiers and two of them carry a published number. Credits reset on the first of each month regardless of when you were billed.
Free
- No credit card required
- 1,000 basic searches, or 500 advanced
- Resets on the 1st, not on your billing date
- Free outright for students
Pay as you go
- No monthly floor
- A basic search is $0.008, an advanced one $0.016
- For flexible or spiky usage
Project
- Monthly plan sized on a slider on the pricing page
- Tavily does not publish a single number, so this directory does not either
- The lowest step shown carries 4,000 credits a month
Enterprise
- Custom API call volumes
- Enterprise-grade support and SLAs
- Enterprise-grade security and privacy
Run out of credits on the free plan and requests stop until the reset or an upgrade, rather than silently billing you. That is the right default and it means the free tier is safe to point an experimental agent at.
Tavily sizes its middle plan with an interactive slider rather than a published figure, so this page does not state one. That is the same rule applied to Smartlead elsewhere in this directory: where a vendor publishes no public rate, the honest thing is to say so rather than to quote the number the slider happened to land on. Pay as you go at $0.008 is the figure you can plan against.
Two kinds of key, and Tavily rate limits that upgrade with them
Tavily API rate limits depend on which kind of key you are holding. Tavily issues development and production keys from the same dashboard, and the difference is throughput rather than features. The catch is that only one endpoint family actually benefits.
| Endpoint | Development key | Production key | What changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search and extract | 100/min | 1,000/min | Ten times the throughput. |
| Crawl | 100/min | 100/min | No change |
| Research | 20/min | 20/min | No change |
| Usage | 10 per 10 min | 10 per 10 min | No change |
Exceeding a limit returns 429 Too Many Requests, and where the response carries a Retry-After header it gives the number of seconds to wait. That is the plain integer form rather than Attio's HTTP-date, so a standard backoff library handles it correctly. The usage endpoint's 10 requests per 10 minutes is the one people trip over, usually by polling their own credit balance in a loop.
Two kinds of key with only one of them upgraded is the trap on this page, because the symptom is a rate limit in production rather than an error in development. Check which key the deployed service is holding before you conclude the plan is too small.
How to create a Tavily API key
Sign up, take the key from the dashboard, and that key authenticates every request. The only decision is which kind you generate, and you can hold both.
Development against production
Same dashboard, different ceilings.
- A development key runs 100 search requests a minute.
- A production key runs 1,000, and nothing else changes.
- Both draw on the same credit balance.
- Keep the dev key for local work so a runaway loop hits the lower ceiling first.
Getting started
Tavily publishes SDKs, so the first call is a few lines.
- Python and JavaScript SDKs, with the key passed at construction.
- 1,000 free credits a month attached from signup, no card.
- Pass include_usage to get the credit cost back in the response.
Developing against the development key and shipping with the production one is a two-minute habit that prevents a whole class of incident. Put the key in the environment rather than the code, and make the deploy fail loudly if the production one is missing rather than quietly falling back.
Where the Tavily API documentation lives
Tavily documents on Mintlify, so every page of the Tavily API docs is also readable as Markdown by appending .md, which is the right way for an agent to read them.
| Surface | Where | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Documentation | docs.tavily.com | Quickstart, SDKs and concepts. |
| Search reference | docs.tavily.com/documentation/api-reference/endpoint/search | Every parameter, including search_depth and auto_parameters. |
| Rate limits | docs.tavily.com/documentation/rate-limits | All four tables above, plus the 429 behavior. |
| Dashboard | app.tavily.com | Keys, credit balance and usage. |
| Pricing | tavily.com/pricing | The credit rate and the plan slider. |
The search reference is the page to read before you ship, because almost every way of overspending on this API is a parameter default rather than a volume problem.
Tavily also ships an MCP server, and it is on the MCP page with the others in this directory.
Tavily's own walkthrough of the API
Tavily publishes this on its own channel, so it is Tavily's account of Tavily, not ours. It is here because a rate card cannot show you the thing moving, and a few minutes of the product is faster than any paragraph on this page at telling you whether the shape of it fits yours.
YouTube · Tavily Getting Started with the Tavily Search API 5:42 · Published February 2025Five minutes in Python: get a key, run a basic search, then the advanced parameters. It is the one video in this set that is genuinely a getting started guide for an API rather than a product film, which is what you would expect from a vendor whose customers are all developers.
Published 26 February 2025 on Tavily, the channel Tavily's own pages link to, and read on 13 October 2026. Nothing in it is a source for a price or a limit on this page: every figure in the tables above comes from a Tavily page.
Strengths and limits
Tavily is a narrow, cheap, well-documented search API, and the simplicity is the product.
What it does well
- The clearest credit model here: 1 for basic, 2 for advanced, $0.008 each.
- 1,000 free credits a month with no card, and free outright for students.
- Requests stop rather than silently billing when free credits run out.
- Published rate limits for every endpoint family and both key types.
- Retry-After is a plain number of seconds, so standard backoff works.
- The response can report its own credit cost, which makes auditing trivial.
Where it falls short
- auto_parameters can select the 2-credit depth without being asked.
- A production key buys ten times the search throughput and nothing on crawl or research.
- Research is capped at 20 requests a minute on every plan.
- The Project tier is a slider with no published figure.
- Returns search results, not records, so anything structured is your problem.
- No contact data, so it complements an enrichment provider rather than replacing one.
Read together, the columns say Tavily is the most legible search pricing here and the easiest to overspend on without noticing. One credit for basic and two for advanced is simple arithmetic right up to the moment auto_parameters picks the more expensive depth for you, so set the depth explicitly in anything that runs unattended.
Where Tavily data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is not how good the data is, it is who is allowed to hold it. These are the fields each one returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tavily | Firmographics, Intent and news | Global | SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor, not your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
If Tavily is not the answer
Four providers in the Sourcing APIs listing that solve the same problem differently. Each one is a trade, and the trade is named.
Exa
$4/1k searchesThe closest like-for-like, at $4 to $7 per 1,000 searches with $10 of credits free every month and an MCP server on the free tier.
Firecrawl
$16/moBuilt for fetching rather than answering: clean Markdown from any URL, from $16 a month, with 1,000 free credits and a keyless tier.
TheirStack
$49/moWhen the query is always the same structured question about hiring or tooling, buy it as a dataset and stop paying per search.
The full set, organized by the reason people leave, is on the Tavily alternatives page.
Tavily against the obvious rival
Same rate cards, read side by side, with the arithmetic done on a worked volume rather than left to you: Exa vs Tavily. Every pairing in the directory is on the compare hub.
Before you build against it
Five things to settle first, each one read off Tavily's own pages. The ticks are remembered in this browser, so you can come back to a half-finished integration.
Who should actually buy this
Buy Tavily when an agent needs to search the web and you want the bill to be predictable. One credit a query at $0.008, with a free tier that stops rather than overspending, is the least surprising pricing in this category, and for most GTM research that is worth more than a marginally better result set.
Set search_depth explicitly on day one. Leaving auto_parameters to decide is how a 1-credit workload becomes a 2-credit one, and the difference does not show up anywhere except the credit balance.
Against Exa, the two are close enough that your query set should decide it. Exa runs an instant mode at $0.004 and an auto mode at $0.007 against Tavily's $0.008 basic, so in instant mode Exa is half the price per search, and it has more modes to tune. Tavily is simpler and its free tier is more generous in practice. Both have one, so run the same fifty queries through each and read the results rather than the rate cards.
Cheap search still needs a reason to search.
An agent querying the web about every account in your list produces a lot of credits spent and not much pipeline. Frontal defines the trigger first, then builds the search, the filter and the handoff into something that runs on its own.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
What Tavily users say, in their own words
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written and linked to the thread.
A dedicated search API beats a model's built-in web tool on content and reach
I wouldn't go with GPT 5 + web unless you don't mind about cost / quality / flexibility and just care about having 1 single tool. GPT 5 is more expensive, they don't return search results + context alone, plus you have access to less content because OpenAI is often blocked by robots.txt I feel smaller providers like Tavily or Linkup give you more flexibility and better results.
r/aiagents · September 2025 · 2 points
The case for buying search separately rather than using whatever your model ships with, from somebody who tried both. The three things they name are the three this page is about: what a call costs, whether the page content comes back alongside the results, and how much of the web the provider is allowed to read at all. A model vendor blocked by robots.txt on a domain you need is not a problem you can prompt your way out of.
They go on to prefer Linkup, which this directory does not carry, so read it as a case for the category rather than for Tavily specifically. Their closing point is worth keeping either way: a narrow search API does what you asked, which is a liability with a vague query and the entire point with a precise one.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
Tavily API, answered
Is the Tavily API free?
Free plan, 1,000 API credits a month, no card. Free for students. Paid use starts at $0.008/credit.
How much does the Tavily API cost?
Tavily starts at $0.008/credit, metered at $0.008 per credit. Billing is pay as you go, subscription and free tier. Read from Tavily's own pricing page on 8 October 2026.
What are the Tavily API rate limits?
Search 100/min on a dev key, 1,000 on production. Crawl 100, research 20.
How do I get a Tavily API key?
API key from the dashboard, as a development or a production key. The current steps are in Tavily's own documentation, which is authoritative on anything that has changed since 8 October 2026.
Does Tavily have an MCP server?
Yes, at https://mcp.tavily.com/mcp/. It is listed with the others on the MCP page.