You.com started as a consumer AI search engine and now sells web search APIs for AI agents and apps. Its search page asks you to sign in, and its old plans page redirects to API pricing. A free tier gives 100 Web Search queries a day through its MCP server with no key, account or card. Pay-as-you-go pricing has no minimums or seats: Web Search and the Answer API cost $5 per 1,000 calls, the Contents API $1 per 1,000 pages, and the Research API $12 to $1,200 per 1,000 calls depending on depth. Enterprise plans add zero data retention, SOC 2 compliance and SLAs.
Reviewed by EdGrows·Updated Oct 10, 2026This analysis is based on documentation, public user reports, and vendor materials — not yet on our own hands-on testing. How we rate
You.com no longer looks like a search engine. Its homepage calls it "the leading web search APIs for AI," and every price on the site is quoted per thousand API calls. Even the old consumer pages point to developers now.
The company began as a consumer rival to Google, and later to Perplexity, with Pro and Team subscriptions. Those plans no longer appear anywhere public. Visiting the search page today brings up a sign-in screen, and the address that once listed consumer plans redirects to API pricing.
What's left is a business selling live search and research to the people building AI agents. For anyone who subscribed years ago, the account page is the only reliable place to check what still works.
There are five endpoints, built on one real-time index. Web Search returns ranked web and news results for your model to reason over, which suits retrieval-augmented generation. Contents takes URLs you already have and returns clean Markdown or HTML. The Answer API turns a question into a cited answer in one call.
Research is the heavyweight. It plans, searches repeatedly, reads full pages and cross-checks before answering, and a single research_effort setting chooses how hard it works. Finance Research is the same engine tuned for company and market questions. A recent addition puts live stock prices, crypto, weather and prediction-market data into Web Search results at the same price.
An MCP server connects all of this to assistants such as Claude and Cursor.
The top of You.com's pricing page on October 10, 2026. Per-endpoint rates are listed further down.
| Endpoint | Typical latency | Price per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Web Search (free tier via MCP) | About 0.4 seconds | Free, up to 100 queries a day |
| Web Search | About 0.4 seconds | $5 calls |
| Contents | 1 to 10 seconds per page | $1 pages |
| Answer | About 2.7 seconds | $5 calls |
| Research Lite | Under 2 seconds | $12 calls |
| Research Standard | 10 to 30 seconds | $50 calls |
| Research Deep | Under 2 minutes | $100 calls |
| Research Exhaustive | Under 5 minutes | $450 calls |
| Research Frontier | About 5 minutes, background only | $1,200 calls |
Each request counts as one call, whatever it returns, so 100 results cost the same as one. Pay-as-you-go has no minimum, no seats and no platform fee, and auto top-up keeps long jobs from stalling. The pricing page also mentions $100 of free credit, worth 20,000 searches.
Enterprise plans add zero data retention, a data processing agreement, custom query rates and SLA-backed support. You.com says its infrastructure is SOC 2 certified.
For a developer adding live web results to an agent, the free MCP tier is an easy way to test quality before writing any integration code. The effort-based Research pricing also suits apps where some questions need a quick lookup and others a five-minute investigation.
For everyday searching, look elsewhere. Perplexity and Felo AI are built for people asking questions in a browser, and Brave Leo comes inside a privacy-focused browser. The AI research tools guide covers more options for that job.
Budget the Research tiers carefully. A thousand Exhaustive calls cost $450, so an app that sends every question to the deepest setting will spend far more than one that saves it for the hard ones.
The search page now asks you to sign in, and the old plans page redirects to API pricing. The public site is entirely about APIs for developers, so for everyday AI search Perplexity or Felo are the more practical choices.
There's a free route: up to 100 Web Search queries a day through the You.com MCP server, with no API key, account or credit card. Beyond that, pay-as-you-go pricing starts at $5 per 1,000 Web Search calls.
It's priced by effort per 1,000 calls: Lite $12, Standard $50, Deep $100, Exhaustive $450 and Frontier $1,200. Deep and Exhaustive finance research cost $110 and $500 per 1,000 calls.
Each request to an endpoint is one call, whatever it returns. A Web Search call with one result costs the same as one with 100. The Contents API is billed per page returned.
Cited AI search plus the new Computer agent: free plan, Pro at $20 or $200 a year, Max at $200, Computer credits, and the free Comet browser.
An academic search engine that answers from peer-reviewed papers. Basic search is free, Pro starts at $12 a month billed yearly, and students get up to 40% off.
A free chat app and one of the cheapest frontier-class APIs: V4.1-Flash with vision and open weights, from $0.15 per million input tokens off-peak.