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MIAPI vs Tavily

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors.

The short answer

Entry price
MIAPI from $9 once, Tavily from $30/mo — different billing units, so no direct winner
Free plan
Both have one
Public API
Both have one
Best fit
MIAPI: Adding cited web answers to an app without building retrieval yourself · Tavily: Developers grounding LLM agents in fresh web results
Trust score
About even — MIAPI 73, Tavily 75

From our own records as of each tool's last check. Anything we have not confirmed is left out rather than guessed. How we verify

MIAPISearch API that returns a written answer with inline citations, source links and a confidence scoreTavilyWeb search, extraction and crawling API built for AI agents, returning cleaned, chunked results ready to feed a model.

Side by side

FactMIAPITavily
CategoryAI Search & Answer EnginesWeb Scraping & Data Extraction
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$9 once$30/mo
Public APIYesYes
Trust score73 / 10075 / 100
PlatformsAPI, WebAPI
CompanyMIAPITavily Inc. (Nebius Group)
Last verifiedOct 15, 2026Oct 29, 2026

What our research says

MIAPI

A cheap, tidy alternative to the big answer APIs, with the two things that matter for grounding, citations and a confidence score, inside the response body and an OpenAI-compatible shape, so switching costs almost nothing. Query packs that never expire suit uneven traffic better than a subscription. What is missing is the vendor: no company name, no address and no country beyond a .uk domain, which is a hard sell for anything production-critical.

Pros

  • Answers come back with inline citations, source links and a confidence score
  • OpenAI-compatible, so existing client libraries work unchanged
  • Knowledge mode indexes your own documents alongside web results
  • Separate news and image endpoints plus an MCP server for desktop clients

Cons

  • No company name, address or country published anywhere on the site, terms included
  • Per-query pricing means cost scales directly with traffic
  • The free allowance is now 100 queries a month, enough to test but not to run anything
  • The 98% accuracy and 1.1-second response figures are the vendor's own, with no published benchmark method

Tavily

Tavily is a sensible default for developers who need agents to search and read the live web without building scraping and ranking themselves. Teams with very high query volume, or that need full raw SERP data and control over sources, should price it against running their own search stack.

Pros

  • Search, extract, crawl, map and research behind one API key
  • Results come chunked and cleaned for model context
  • 1,000 free credits a month without a card
  • Built-in PII and prompt-injection filtering

Cons

  • Advanced requests consume more credits, which makes costs harder to predict
  • Requests stop outright when monthly credits run out on the free tier
  • Now owned by Nebius, so roadmap and terms may shift with the parent

Which one fits

Choose MIAPI if you need

  • Adding cited web answers to an app without building retrieval yourself
  • Teams already calling an OpenAI-shaped client who want a grounded endpoint
  • Wiring live search into Claude Desktop or Cursor over MCP

Choose Tavily if you need

  • Developers grounding LLM agents in fresh web results
  • RAG pipelines that need clean extracted page content
  • Prototypes that need web access on a free tier

MIAPI vs Tavily: the questions people ask

Is MIAPI cheaper than Tavily?

They charge in different units, so there is no like-for-like answer: MIAPI starts at $9 once, Tavily at $30/mo. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it.

Does MIAPI or Tavily have a free tier?

Both: MIAPI has a free tier, and Tavily has a free tier.

Which has a public API, MIAPI or Tavily?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.

More comparisons

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