You.com
Web search and inference APIs, priced per call.
What it is
You.com is now a per-call search and inference API platform: Web Search API, Contents API, Inference Router and the Answer / Research endpoints, all running on one real-time index. The free entry point is MCP with 100 queries a day, no API key and no card. The consumer multi-model search workspace is no longer the lead product — if what you are after is a chat-style search interface, this is probably not it.
Pricing updated 2026-11-12 Official pricing
Priced per call with no minimums or platform fee; each endpoint is quoted on the pricing page.
Open pricingTalk to sales — zero data retention, SOC 2, DPA, custom QPS and SLA support.
Open pricingYou.com pricing explained
Three published shapes. Free is $0 through the MCP server: 100 web search queries a day, no API key, no account, no card. Pay as you go is priced per call with no minimums, no seats and no platform fee, with each endpoint quoted on its own table — that is why this tier carries no single headline number. Enterprise is custom: zero data retention, SOC 2, a DPA, dedicated capacity and SLA-backed support, sold through sales. Note what has changed: You.com now leads with APIs, and the consumer multi-model search workspace is no longer the headline product.
Free-tier limits are taken from the official pricing page on the update date above. They change often — confirm before you commit to an annual plan.
You.com key features
Web Search API
Returns ranked results with titles, URLs and highlighted snippets from a real-time index, which is the piece most agent pipelines actually need.
Contents API
Takes the URLs a search returned and extracts clean page content, so you do not have to write and maintain your own scraper for every site.
Answer and Research endpoints
One returns a cited answer, the other runs a longer multi-step investigation. Both save building a retrieval loop on top of raw results.
Inference Router
Routes a request to a leading model without you holding accounts with each provider, which is useful when you want one bill and one SDK.
Finance Research API
A vertical endpoint for market and company questions, aimed at products where general web search is not the right index.
MCP server with a free allowance
The MCP entry point needs no API key, account or card and covers 100 search queries a day, which is enough to evaluate it inside an agent.
You.com: how it works
One index behind every endpoint
Search, contents, answer and research all run on the same real-time index rather than four separately crawled corpora, so results stay consistent across calls.
Priced per call, not per seat
There is no platform fee and no minimum: you pay for queries and extracted pages. That makes cost proportional to usage, and makes forecasting a matter of arithmetic.
Zero data retention on enterprise
The custom tier adds ZDR, SOC 2 and a DPA, which is the requirement that usually decides whether an API can be used with customer data at all.
You.com core strengths
No scraping layer to maintain
Search plus content extraction in two calls removes the part of a retrieval pipeline that breaks most often when a site changes its markup.
Free tier you can actually test with
A hundred queries a day through MCP, no key and no card, is enough to decide whether the index suits your domain before you talk to sales.
One vendor for search and inference
Routing both through the same account means one SDK, one bill and one place to look when a request is slow.
You.com compared with alternatives
| Tool | You.com | Perplexity | ChatGPT | Poe |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Products that need search plus extraction as an API | A research interface with citations, for people | General assistant work including search | Trying many models in one chat interface |
| Pricing shape | Free MCP allowance / pay per call / enterprise custom | Free / Pro $20 per month / Max $200 | Free / Plus $20 per month / Pro $200 | Free with limits / subscription tiers |
| What you actually get | Ranked results, page contents, cited answers and model routing | Answers in a chat UI, with sources you can open | A chat product, not an endpoint | A consumer multi-model chat client |
Written from the official product pages listed under Sources, not copied from another directory. Prices and limits reflect the update date above; features ship faster than reviews, so treat the list as a starting point and confirm on the official site.
Pros and cons
Strengths
- Comparing two models side by side is genuinely fast
- Workspace model keeps sources attached to a project
- Good academic search mode
Limitations
- More setup than a plain chat assistant
- Feature set has shifted several times
- Smaller ecosystem than the leaders
You.com use cases
Adding search to an agent
Give a local agent a retrieval tool that returns real URLs and snippets, instead of letting it answer from stale weights.
Building a cited answer product
Call the Answer endpoint instead of assembling search, chunking and prompting yourself, and get citations in the response.
Feeding a RAG pipeline
Search for candidate pages, then pull clean contents in a second call, so the chunking step starts from text rather than HTML.
Market research tooling
Use the finance endpoint where a general web index would return commentary instead of filings and market data.
