Free SERP API tiers compared (2026)
SerpApi gives 250 searches a month, Serper gives 2,500 once, FastAF gives 500 credits (100 searches) once. Checked on each pricing page, August 2026.
“Free tier” means different things depending on the vendor: a monthly allowance that resets, or a one-time bucket of credits that never comes back. That difference changes how you should actually use it, so here is what each one gives you, verified on the vendor’s own pricing page.
What each free tier actually gives you
SerpApi: the Free plan is $0 for 250 searches per month, capped at 50 requests per hour of throughput, checked on SerpApi’s pricing page in August 2026. It resets monthly rather than being a one-time trial, so it stays useful indefinitely at low volume, but 250 searches a month is roughly 8 a day if you spread them evenly, and the 50/hour cap means you cannot burst through a batch job.
Serper: 2,500 free queries on signup, no credit card required, confirmed on Serper’s site in August 2026. This is a one-time allocation, not a monthly reset: once the 2,500 are used, you are on the paid credit packs. For a single upfront evaluation, that is a larger bucket than SerpApi’s recurring 250; for an ongoing low-volume habit, SerpApi’s monthly reset actually gives you more over a year (3,000 vs. a one-time 2,500).
FastAF: 500 credits, one-time, no credit card. A /serp search costs 5 credits, so that is 100 Google searches to test with, at 2 concurrent requests. Like Serper’s tier, it does not reset, it is meant for evaluating field coverage and response shape before you buy a credit pack, not as a permanent free quota.
| Provider | Free tier | Type | Card required | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SerpApi | 250 searches/month (50/hour cap) | Recurring | Not required | pricing page, Aug 2026 |
| Serper | 2,500 queries | One-time | Not required | serper.dev, Aug 2026 |
| FastAF | 500 credits = 100 searches | One-time | Not required | pricing, Aug 2026 |
Recurring vs. one-time: which matters for you?
If you are building something that runs a handful of searches a day forever, a recurring free tier like SerpApi’s is worth more than it looks: 250 a month with no expiry beats a bigger one-time bucket you will burn through in a busy afternoon.
If you are evaluating an API before committing, a one-time bucket like Serper’s or ours is arguably more honest about what it is for: enough volume to check result quality, field coverage and latency on your actual queries, not a permanent low-volume plan disguised as a trial. Neither Serper’s nor our free tier is meant to run production traffic; SerpApi’s technically can, at 8 searches a day.
The throughput trap
A monthly quota is not the only limit that matters. SerpApi’s free plan caps throughput at 50 requests per hour regardless of your monthly balance, so even if you have searches left for the month, a burst of 60 requests in ten minutes will queue or fail. Check the hourly or concurrent-request cap on any free tier before you build a batch job against it, not just the headline monthly number.
What this means for testing before you pay
None of these free tiers are large enough to validate a production workload, and none of them should be: they exist to let you check that the response shape matches what your code expects before you write a payment method down anywhere. A reasonable evaluation checklist, regardless of vendor: run your actual query shape (not a generic test query), check the fields you need are present (position, snippet, whatever your parser reads), and check what happens on a query that returns zero organic results, since that edge case breaks more scrapers than the happy path does.
The short version
SerpApi’s 250/month resets forever but throttles hard at 50/hour. Serper’s 2,500 is a bigger one-time bucket with no ongoing allowance after that. FastAF’s 500 credits (100 searches) is the same one-time shape as Serper’s, sized for evaluating the response before you decide. Pick based on whether you need a permanent trickle of free searches or a single upfront test batch. Full plan breakdown, including what happens after the free tier, on our pricing page and in the SerpApi comparison.