metasearch.sh vs Tavily

Tavily sells a search API for AI agents with basic and advanced search depth, plus extract, crawl, map and research endpoints and a hosted MCP server. metasearch.sh will list Tavily at $0.012 a call once it is enabled. Today the same jobs run on jina, serper, brave and others, behind one key and one prepaid balance, at each engine's list price × 1.5.

Price

per 1,000 callsTavily directTavily through uscheapest engine here
Basic search1 credit at $0.008, pay as you go$8$12not enabled yet$0.75jina · general
Advanced search2 credits at $0.008$16$24not enabled yet$1.50serper · deep
Tavily plans
Pay as you go at $0.008 a credit, or monthly plans from $30 for 4,000 credits down to $0.005 a credit at $500 for 100,000.
Tavily free tier
1,000 credits a month.

Where Tavily wins

  • If Tavily is the only engine you need, going direct costs less per call, and monthly plans lower it further.
  • 1,000 free credits every month, where metasearch.sh gives a one-time sign-up credit.
  • Crawl, map and research endpoints, which metasearch.sh does not offer.

Where metasearch.sh wins

  • Cheaper general search engines on the same key, and one balance for every engine instead of a credit pool per vendor.
  • One key and one balance for 8 engines across 12 modes: serper, exa, jina, brave, linkup, perplexity, firecrawl, xai.
  • Failed, timed-out and empty calls cost nothing; you pay for the engine that returned results.
  • Ask several engines in one call and get one list, merged by rank fusion.
  • Any page as markdown from $0.00075 with our own fetch, escalating to rendering services when a page needs a browser.
  • Live X posts through xAI, in social mode.
  • Auto routing picks the mode and says why in the response, at no charge.
  • The open-source search-cli and an MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor and VS Code, on the same key.
get your keyevery price

Sources

Also compared: Exa · SerpApi