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Tavily vs You.com

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
Tavily from $30/mo, You.com from $0.005/request — different billing units, so no direct winner
Free plan
Both have one
Public API
Both have one
Higher Trust score
You.com — 96 vs 75 for Tavily
Best fit
Tavily: Developers grounding LLM agents in fresh web results · You.com: Agent and RAG builders who need a live web index with citations through an API or MCP

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

TavilyWeb search, extraction and crawling API built for AI agents, returning cleaned, chunked results ready to feed a model.You.comWeb search, content extraction and research APIs for grounding AI agents, with a sign-in chat product kept behind the front door.

Side by side

FactTavilyYou.com
CategoryWeb Scraping & Data ExtractionAI Search & Answer Engines
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$30/mo$0.005/request
Public APIYesYes
Trust score75 / 10096 / 100
PlatformsAPIWeb, API
CompanyTavily Inc. (Nebius Group)SuSea, Inc.
Last verifiedOct 29, 2026Oct 16, 2026

What our research says

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

You.com

Treat You.com as an API vendor now: the homepage, pricing and about pages are all about search, extraction and research endpoints for agents, with a free MCP allowance that lets you try the index without an account. The per-call prices are plain and the research tiers go deep enough to replace a scraping pipeline, but the consumer chat that the brand was known for has retreated behind sign-in with no visible plan, so anyone arriving for a ChatGPT alternative should look at Perplexity instead.

Pros

  • 100 free Web Search queries a day via MCP with no key, account or card
  • Published per-1,000-call prices across search, contents, answer and research endpoints (15 October 2026)
  • Research tiers from Lite to Frontier cover quick lookups through background deep dives
  • Enterprise options with zero data retention, SOC 2 and custom QPS

Cons

  • The consumer chat product has no public plans page; /plans returns 404 and /chat redirects to sign-in
  • Deep research tiers are expensive per call and only make sense in volume
  • FAQ entries on credit expiry and volume discounts are present but empty on the pricing page
  • No desktop or mobile apps linked from the current site

Which one fits

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

Choose You.com if you need

  • Agent and RAG builders who need a live web index with citations through an API or MCP
  • Teams that want deep, multi-step research calls priced per request rather than per seat
  • Enterprises that need zero data retention and SOC 2 on their search layer

Tavily vs You.com: the questions people ask

Is Tavily cheaper than You.com?

They charge in different units, so there is no like-for-like answer: Tavily starts at $30/mo, You.com at $0.005/request. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it.

Does Tavily or You.com have a free tier?

Both: Tavily has a free tier, and You.com has a free tier.

Which has a public API, Tavily or You.com?

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

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