Hard facts side by side: free tiers, prices, limits, SDKs and privacy. Every value links to the official page it came from and is re-checked every week.
| Fact |  Tavily |  Exa |  FirecrawlBuilding block |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes 1,000 API credits per month, no credit card required. Source, Sep 29, 2026 | Yes $10 in credits each month (up to 2,500 Instant searches). Source, Sep 29, 2026 | Yes 1,000 credits per month, no card required. Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
| Starting price |
| $0.008 per credit Pay-as-you-go; the Project plan (4,000 credits/month) has slider-based pricing. Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
| $4 per 1,000 searches Pay-as-you-go Instant search, up to 10 results per request. Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
| $16/month Hobby plan, 5,000 credits/month, billed annually. Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
| Rate limit | 100 requests/min Development keys; production keys get 1,000 requests/min. Source, Sep 29, 2026 | 10 QPS Default for /search, /answer and /chat/completions; /contents is 100 QPS. Source, Sep 29, 2026 | 10 requests/min Free plan scrape/map/search; crawl is 2/min, 2 concurrent requests. Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
|---|
| Size limit | 20 results per query max_results for the Search endpoint ranges 0 to 20 (default 10). Source, Sep 29, 2026 | 100 results per query Public max for numResults; higher limits via sales. Source, Sep 29, 2026 | 10,000 pages per crawl Default crawl limit; larger crawls bounded by available credits. Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
|---|
| Official SDKs | PythonJavaScript / TypeScriptSource, Sep 29, 2026 | PythonJavaScript / TypeScript | PythonJavaScript / TypeScript |
|---|
| Open source | Not listed | Not listed | Yes Self-hostable under AGPL-3.0; SDKs are MIT licensed. Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
|---|
| EU hosting | Not listed | Not listed | No Privacy policy states servers and data are located in the United States. Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
|---|
| Compliance | SOC 2GDPRSource, Sep 29, 2026 | SOC 2HIPAASource, Sep 29, 2026 | SOC 2Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
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