The pricing is so different between these:

ceramic.ai - $0.25 per 1,000 requests

Exa - $7.00 per 1,000 requests

Linkup - $5.00 per 1,000 requests

Does anyone have insights on the quality differences? Web search API pricing for AI agent usecases has always felt so expensive for what it is, but I have no grounding on the economics of running a web index.

EDIT: formatting

I recently tried a bunch of web search APIs. Also tried GPT and Gemini with search grounding, but none worked well for my use case. You can see some good comparisons and benchmarks at https://mattcollins.net/web-search-apis-for-llms and https://openbenchmarks.com

i looked up what alternatives there'd be and openrouter also makes its search API available. it's exa too, but $4 per 1000 results.

https://serper.dev/ is $1 per 1,000

They have 2,500 free which I used, it seemed good.

I'm unaffiliated--actually a clanker told me about it so I told it "go ahead"

> Competitors don't really matter [...] Sure, there are more "table-stakes" features that customers need before they'll even consider using you, but the real competitor is a lack of awareness of your product, more than anything.

I like this quote a lot. I think it addresses a common execution paralysis where someone identifies a solution to a rich problem space but decides against building it due to there being an obvious competitor.