You.com
Web search APIs built for AI applications and agents
Overview
You.com used to be a direct competitor to Google or Perplexity, a consumer chat and search product with a free tier and a $20/mo Pro plan. By mid-2026 that consumer product is effectively gone. The public you.com site is now built around API documentation and developer sign-up, not a chat box for individuals, and the old You Pro and Team consumer plans no longer have a public pricing page.
What's left is a genuinely useful piece of infrastructure for developers: a set of search, content-extraction, and research APIs priced per call, meant to be plugged into your own AI app or agent rather than used directly by an end user. If you're a developer who needs real-time web search or cited research inside a product you're building, this is worth evaluating. If you were hoping to sign up for a You.com chat subscription the way you might with ChatGPT or Perplexity, that product no longer really exists in the form it used to, and we'd point you to those instead.
Key Features
Web Search API: Programmatic access to real-time web search results for AI applications.
Contents API: Fetches full page text and metadata from URLs in batch.
Research API: Cited, source-backed research answers across Lite, Standard, Deep, and Exhaustive depth tiers.
Finance Research API: Specialized research covering filings, macro data, and market calculations.
Pay-As-You-Go Billing: No subscription lock-in, usage-based pricing with volume discounts at scale.
Pricing
Starting price
Usage-based, no flat monthly fee (Web Search API from $5 per 1,000 calls; $100 free credit to start)
Web Search API: $5.00 per 1,000 calls.
Contents API: $1.00 per 1,000 page fetches.
Research API: From $12.00 per 1,000 calls (Lite tier), rising for Standard, Deep, and Exhaustive depth.
Finance Research API: From $110.00 per 1,000 calls.
Free Credit: $100 provided to new accounts to test before paying.
Disclaimer: pricing may change, confirm on You.com's own pricing page before buying. Note that You.com's consumer chat/search subscription plans (You Pro, Team) that were previously advertised no longer appear to be publicly available as of this writing.
Pros
No Subscription Lock-In: Pure usage-based billing means you only pay for calls you actually make.
Free Credit to Start: $100 in free credit lets you test the APIs before committing spend.
Purpose-Built for AI Apps: Search, content extraction, and research are split into separate APIs you can mix as needed.
Citation-Backed Research: The Research API returns sourced answers, useful for anything where you need to show your work.
Cons
Consumer Product Is Gone: If you want a ChatGPT-style search chat for personal use, that's no longer what You.com offers.
Developer-Only Now: Not usable at all if you don't have the technical setup to call an API.
Costs Scale With Usage: No flat monthly number to budget against, high-volume use can add up quickly, especially on Research and Finance Research tiers.
Confusing Legacy Reviews: A lot of existing reviews and comparisons online still describe the old consumer product, which no longer reflects what You.com actually sells today.
What Makes It Unique
Full API Suite for AI Search: You.com splits web search, content extraction, and cited research into dedicated APIs built specifically to be embedded in other AI products, rather than offering just one general search endpoint.
Kay Score
6
/ 10
Tool Information
Pricing
Usage-based, no flat monthly fee (Web Search API from $5 per 1,000 calls; $100 free credit to start)
Category
Coding & Development
Platform
Web / iOS / Android
Last Updated
