SerpApi pricing and review

Reachkit makes a cold email tool, not a search API, so it doesn’t compete with SerpApi directly. Every price here was checked on October 15, 2026 against SerpApi’s own pricing, Enterprise and terms pages.

SerpApi pricing starts with a free plan of 250 searches a month, and paid plans run from $25 to $2,750 a month before the Cloud tiers. Every plan is month to month in US dollars; we found no yearly prices. Figures from serpapi.com/pricing, checked October 15, 2026; the cost per 1,000 is our math.

What a search is. One successful request, whether it returns 100 results or none. Errors, failures and exact repeats within an hour (served from cache) are free. Page two of a result is a second search. Each plan also guarantees an hourly throughput, from 50 searches an hour on Free to 640,000 on Cloud 54M.

Extras by plan. The U.S. Legal Shield, SerpApi’s offer of up to $2 million in cover for collecting public search data, starts on Production per its terms. ZeroTrace Mode (nothing stored) and priority support need a Cloud tier or Enterprise. Faster Ludicrous Speed modes cost twice or four times the normal price.

Renewals. Running out early means renewing early: the allowance refills and the renewal date moves up. The pricing page only covers leftovers on a downgrade, which moves them to “Extra Credits”. The Enterprise page says unused searches don’t roll over; a G2 reviewer says the same of plans.

Enterprise is $3,750 a month with 100,000 searches, billed per use above that, plus a custom contract, invoicing and a 99.97% SLA. Cloud 1M costs the same with 1,000,000 searches.

SerpApi runs a live search the moment you ask and returns the results page as clean data. You send one web request with a query and your API key, plus optional engine and location. Back comes organic results, ads, the local pack, the knowledge graph or Google’s AI Overview, as JSON by default, raw HTML, or Markdown aimed at AI models.

SerpApi handles proxies, CAPTCHAs and parsing for you. Its pricing page lists more than 100 APIs: nearly 60 for Google (Search, Maps, Shopping, Scholar, Jobs, Trends, AI Mode), plus Bing, Baidu, Amazon, Walmart, YouTube, Yelp, app stores and more.

It isn’t a contact database. A Google Maps listing gives a business’s phone and website, not a decision maker’s email. SerpApi lists libraries for Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Go and other languages, and runs an open-source MCP server, a standard way for AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT to use other apps.

Strengths

• Breadth. One key covers Google, other engines, marketplaces and app stores (pricing page).
• Fair billing rules. Failed requests and repeats within an hour cost nothing (Search API docs).
• Open pricing. Every self-serve tier up to 54 million searches is published, with a 7-day refund if you used under 20%.
• Support. Reviewers on G2, Capterra and Trustpilot single it out (see below).
• Ready for AI agents. The hosted MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor search through SerpApi.

Drawbacks

• Price per search. G2’s review summary lists high costs as the top con, and rival SERP APIs advertise lower rates on their own comparison pages.
• Built for steady use. A G2 reviewer wrote “Credits expire with every renewal”, and others want pricing for sporadic needs.
• Open lawsuits. Google and Reddit have both sued SerpApi over scraping (see the FAQ). SerpApi tells customers “nothing about your service changes” (SerpApi blog).

SerpApi scores high on every review site, from few reviews. Trustpilot shows 4.9 from 106 reviews, checked October 15, 2026, with a note that SerpApi doesn’t ask for reviews, so they may not be representative. G2 shows 4.8 from 29 and Capterra 5.0 from over 60, both read from search results.

Support comes up again and again in the praise. “Their help desk is fast and over delivers,” a Trustpilot reviewer wrote in October 2026. The complaints are about money: G2’s summary lists high costs and unclear credits, and Value for Money is Capterra’s lowest sub-score at 4.7.

SerpApi fits developers and AI products that need fresh search results at a steady monthly volume and would rather pay for parsed data than maintain scrapers.

Look elsewhere if you need a few thousand searches once a quarter, or if what you want is people and emails rather than results pages. Cold emailers can use it to pull Google Maps businesses into a list. Cold email is 80% list, so I’d treat those listings as a starting point: you still need a named contact, a found email and a verification pass before anything reaches a sending inbox. More in lead scraping for cold email.

SearchApi, DataForSEO and VALUE SERP are other search APIs; we haven’t checked their prices. For building lead lists:

• PhantomBuster: cloud automations that scrape LinkedIn and other sites (15+ platforms), from $69 a month per workspace. See the PhantomBuster profile.
• Apollo: a contact database with Google Maps search and sequences built in, with a free plan and Basic at $65 a seat a month. See the Apollo profile.
• Clay: enrichment tables that query many data providers per row, with a free plan and Launch at $185 a month. See the Clay profile.
• Hunter: finds and verifies emails from a company domain, with a free plan and Starter at $49 a month. See the Hunter profile.
• Reachkit (our product): if you’d use SerpApi to build a cold email list, Reachkit’s Lead Finder searches 500M+ people and 70M+ companies by title, location and industry, verifying emails before leads join a campaign. It doesn’t return live search results or Maps listings.