upAPI vs Serper
Keep the price sensibility, lose the single-purpose ceiling.
TL;DR: Is Serper or upAPI the better fit?
Pick Serper when Google search results are the whole requirement: it is prepaid, has no subscription, and its packs run from $1.00 down to $0.30 per 1,000 queries. Pick upAPI when search is one call among several, since one key also covers page metadata, sitemaps and Maps. upAPI’s search is DuckDuckGo-backed, not Google.
How Serper charges
Prepaid packs with no subscription — $50, $375, $1,250 and $3,750 — with the per-1,000 rate falling from $1.00 to $0.30 as the pack grows, 2,500 free queries to start, and credits that expire after six months.
How upAPI charges
A monthly subscription rather than a prepaid pack. Units are pooled across the whole catalog, so a month you spend entirely on Maps and a month you spend entirely on developer data draw on the same budget.
USD 29 / mo · USD 0.29 per 1,000 units · full pricing
Last checked 2026-10-05. Serper figures here were read from their own pages on that date. We do not restate a competitor’s number we have not seen ourselves, and where they publish none we say so; if this date has aged, check theirs before ours.
Serper and upAPI side by side
| Feature | Serper | upAPI |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Prepaid packs with no subscription: $50 for 50,000 credits ($1.00 per 1,000), $375 for 500,000 ($0.75), $1,250 for 2.5 million ($0.50) and $3,750 for 12.5 million ($0.30). Credits are valid for 6 months. | Free at $0, then Starter $29 for 100,000 weighted units a month, Pro $99 for 500,000 and Scale $499 for 5,000,000. Each operation declares its own unit cost, and the quota is pooled across the catalog. |
| Free tier | 2,500 free queries, no credit card. | The Free plan: 1,000 weighted units a month across every public operation, with no trial clock. |
| Endpoints | Google Search, Images, News, Maps, Places, Videos, Shopping, Scholar, Patents and Autocomplete. | Web search (DuckDuckGo-backed) and Google Autocomplete, inside a wider catalog. There is no Google SERP, Images, News, Scholar or Patents endpoint. |
| Output format | JSON. Their sample Search response carries knowledgeGraph, organic, peopleAlsoAsk and relatedSearches. | JSON on every operation, shaped by its published output schema. Web search returns titles, URLs and snippets. |
| JavaScript rendering | Not listed on their homepage. | Only inside operations built on a browser: screenshot and HTML-to-PDF. Other operations have no render flag, and the page-to-Markdown operation reports a client-rendered page as an error rather than returning it empty. |
| Proxies | Not listed on their homepage. Result location is customisable by country and language. | Included in the unit price. The exit is chosen per operation, and many operations accept your own proxy URL. |
This page exists to be useful rather than to win. Serper does one thing at a price that is hard to argue with, and if search results are the whole requirement then a prepaid pack from them is very likely the right answer.
What we would say against it is narrow and specific: expiring credits push the risk onto the buyer, and a single-purpose product becomes a second and third vendor the moment the project needs anything that is not a SERP. That is the exact overhead upAPI exists to remove — one key, one bill, one request shape, across a catalog rather than an endpoint.
Worth knowing before you compare directly: on Google SERP depth we are not a like-for-like replacement — our public search is web-search (structured results, 1 unit) and google-autocomplete (real Google suggestions, 1 unit), and the browser SERP scrapers stay gated. If Google result pages at volume are the whole job, keep Serper. If search is one call among ten, one unit on the same pooled quota is the cheaper shape.
Where Serper wins
- Price and speed on Google specifically. If Google SERP results are the requirement, Serper is one of the cheapest and fastest ways to get them, at up to 300 queries a second — our public search operations are DuckDuckGo-backed results and Google Autocomplete, not a full Google SERP scrape.
- No monthly commitment. A prepaid pack is genuinely the right model for bursty, project-shaped work, and it is the cleanest pricing page in the set — we say so because it is true.
- Nothing to configure. One endpoint, one key, results.
Where upAPI wins
- Breadth. Maps places, Reddit threads, developer and finance data, OCR, transcription, page-to-Markdown, screenshots and HTML-to-PDF are one key and one quota; Serper is search.
- Credits do not expire six months later, because there are no credits — a monthly quota simply resets, so you are never holding a balance you have to spend before a deadline.
- Structured schemas and generated snippets in eight languages, plus an OpenAPI document and a typed SDK, rather than one endpoint you shape yourself.
- MCP and copilot access, which a single-endpoint product has no reason to build.
When to pick which
- Serper. Google results are the requirement, especially at volume: their Ultimate pack is rate-limited at 300 queries a second, and they cover Images, News, Scholar and Patents that upAPI does not.
- Serper. The work is bursty or project-shaped and you would rather prepay once than hold a monthly subscription.
- upAPI. Search is one call among several and you want page metadata, sitemaps, Maps or screenshots on the same key and the same bill.
- upAPI. You do not want a balance that expires: Serper credits are valid for 6 months, while an upAPI monthly quota simply resets.
- Both. Google result depth matters for one job and everything else is spread across sources. Keep Serper for the SERP calls and put the rest on upAPI.
What switching actually costs
Not a swap so much as a consolidation. Teams typically keep a search vendor and move everything else onto one key — the free tier is enough to see which of your calls the catalog already covers.
Questions about Serper and upAPI
How much does Serper cost?
Serper sells prepaid packs with no subscription: $50 for 50,000 credits, $375 for 500,000, $1,250 for 2.5 million and $3,750 for 12.5 million, which works out to $1.00 down to $0.30 per 1,000 queries. Credits are valid for 6 months (their homepage, read 2026-10-05).
Does Serper have a free tier?
Yes. Serper gives 2,500 free queries with no credit card. Whether those free queries expire is not stated on their homepage. upAPI’s free plan is a monthly quota that resets rather than a one-off balance.
Do Serper credits expire?
Yes. Every pack on their pricing table says credits are valid for 6 months, and they stop accepting queries when the balance reaches zero. upAPI has no credits to expire: units come from a monthly quota that resets.
Does upAPI return Google search results like Serper?
Not full Google result pages. upAPI’s web search is DuckDuckGo-backed and returns titles, URLs and snippets, and Google Autocomplete returns real Google suggestions. The browser-based Google SERP scrapers are not public. If Google result pages are the whole job, Serper is the better fit.
Can I use Serper and upAPI together?
Yes. They are independent services with their own keys. One way to split it is to keep Serper for the Google SERP calls and use upAPI for everything else the project needs, such as page metadata, sitemaps and Maps.
Sources read on 2026-10-05: https://serper.dev/.
Other comparisons: Apify, Bright Data, ScraperAPI, ApyHub, RapidAPI, ScrapingBee, Firecrawl, ScreenshotOne.