SerpApi vs SearchHive Pricing — Which Search API Is Cheaper?

If you're comparing search APIs for your application, pricing is probably the first filter. SerpApi and SearchHive take different approaches to billing — and the cheaper option depends entirely on what you're building.

This breakdown covers actual costs for common workloads: SERP monitoring, AI agent search, price comparison tools, and RAG pipelines. Not marketing copy, not "starting at" pricing — real numbers based on what each API charges per request.

Key Takeaways

• SerpApi charges per search with different rates per engine (Google, Bing, Google News, etc.)
• SearchHive uses a unified credit system across all engines — Google, Bing, news, academic
• For pure Google SERP scraping, SerpApi and SearchHive are close in price at low volumes
• SearchHive pulls ahead when you need multiple engines, web scraping, or structured extraction alongside search
• Both offer free tiers — SearchHive's includes scraping credits, SerpApi's is search-only

Pricing Models Compared

SerpApi Pricing

SerpApi bills per successful search across separate engine endpoints. Each engine has its own rate:

• Google Organic: $50/5,000 searches ($0.01/search)
• Google News: $50/5,000 searches ($0.01/search)
• Bing: $50/5,000 searches ($0.01/search)
• Google Shopping: $50/2,500 searches ($0.02/search)
• Google Maps: $100/2,500 searches ($0.04/search)

The issue: you pay separately for each engine. If your app monitors both Google organic and Google News results, those are two separate pools.

SerpApi also charges for extra parameters (location, language, device type) at the same per-search rate.

SearchHive Pricing

SearchHive uses a unified credit system. One credit = one search, regardless of engine:

• All engines included: Google, Bing, Google News, Bing News, academic search, and metasearch
• Scraping included: Web page scraping (SwiftSearch/ScrapeForge) uses the same credit pool
• Extraction included: AI-powered data extraction (DeepDive) uses credits too
• Per-request cost decreases with volume — no separate pricing tiers per engine

You're not buying "Google search credits" then "Bing search credits" then "scraping credits." Everything shares one pool.

Cost Comparison by Use Case

Use Case 1: SERP Monitoring (10,000 Google searches/month)

SearchHive wins by ~20% for pure Google SERP work. The gap widens if you also need to scrape the pages behind those results.

Use Case 2: AI Agent with Multi-Engine Search (5,000 Google + 3,000 Bing + 2,000 News)

SerpApi bills each engine separately. SearchHive treats them all as the same credit. Multi-engine usage is where the pricing model difference becomes significant — SearchHive costs 40% less here.

Use Case 3: RAG Pipeline (5,000 searches + 5,000 page scrapes)

SerpApi only does search. To build a RAG pipeline, you need a second tool for scraping. SearchHive handles both in one API. The all-in cost favors SearchHive by $20-50/month depending on which scraping tool you'd otherwise use.

Feature Comparison

Code Examples

SerpApi

from serpapi import GoogleSearch

params = {
    "q": "best web scraping APIs",
    "api_key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
    "location": "Austin, Texas",
    "hl": "en",
    "gl": "us"
}
search = GoogleSearch(params)
results = search.get_dict()

for result in results.get("organic_results", []):
    print(result["title"], result["link"])

SearchHive

import requests

resp = requests.get("https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/search", params={
    "q": "best web scraping APIs",
    "engine": "google",
    "location": "Austin, Texas",
    "language": "en"
}, headers={"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"})

results = resp.json()
for item in results["results"]:
    print(item["title"], item["url"])

The difference in the SearchHive version: you can switch engine to bing or google_news without changing your code structure or your billing. Same endpoint, same credits.

When SerpApi Makes Sense

SerpApi isn't bad — it's just narrow. Consider it when:

• You only need Google SERP data and nothing else
• You've already built your pipeline around SerpApi's response format
• You need Google Maps or Google Shopping specifically (SerpApi has mature implementations)
• Your volume is very low and pricing differences are negligible

When SearchHive Is the Better Choice

SearchHive wins when your use case goes beyond a single search engine:

• AI agents that need search + scraping + extraction in one pipeline
• RAG applications where you search, scrape result pages, and extract structured data
• Multi-engine monitoring across Google and Bing
• Budget-conscious teams that want one API bill instead of three
• Projects that might scale — unified credits mean predictable costs as you add engines

/compare/serpapi /blog/best-serpapi-alternatives-cheaper-search-apis-for-developers

The Bottom Line

For single-engine Google SERP scraping, both APIs are competitive. SearchHive is slightly cheaper.

For anything involving multiple engines, scraping, or AI/LLM workflows, SearchHive's unified pricing model saves 30-50% compared to SerpApi plus whatever additional tools you'd need.

Stop paying for search, scraping, and extraction as separate line items. Get started with SearchHive — free tier, no credit card, all engines included.