SerpApi pricing is a monthly search bucket in USD, not a per-keyword trends meter. On 29 August 2026 the public grid at serpapi.com/pricing lists Free at $0 for 250 searches (50 per hour), Starter at $25 for 1,000 ($25 per 1,000), then Developer $75 / 5,000, Production $150 / 15,000, Big Data $275 / 30,000, and Cloud 54M at $106,050 for 54 million searches. Only successful searches count. Cached, errored, and failed searches do not. Google Trends Explore (engine=google_trends) and Trending Now (engine=google_trends_trending_now) spend that same bucket. Trends MCP is the cheaper meter for multi-source trend history (Free 100 requests, Starter $19 / 1,000 on 29 August 2026) and it is not a SERP, maps, flights, or shopping-results API.

What does SerpApi charge on the public grid?

Self-serve SerpApi is month-to-month. The pricing page copy says "Cancel anytime." There is no annual toggle on that grid. Prices below are the Best Effort rates published on 29 August 2026.

PlanPriceSearches / monthThroughput / hourEffective $ / 1,000
Free$025050n/a
Starter$251,000200$25.00
Developer$755,0001,000$15.00
Production$15015,0003,000$10.00
Big Data$27530,0006,000$9.17
Searcher$725100,00020,000$7.25
Volume$1,475250,00050,000$5.90
Infrastructure$2,750500,000100,000$5.50
Cloud 1M$3,7501,000,000110,000$3.75

Cloud plans continue in 1 million search steps through Cloud 54M at $106,050 / month (640,000 searches per hour). Custom volume goes to [email protected].

Throughput is "the guaranteed number of successful searches per hour." Free through Infrastructure sit at 20% of the monthly count. Cloud 1M does not: 110,000 per hour on 1,000,000 searches is 11% of the monthly bucket.

The FAQ on the same page is the billing rule that actually moves the invoice:

  • Successful searches count. Cached, errored, and failed searches do not.
  • Result depth does not change the credit: 100 results or an empty result set both count as 1 search.
  • Full refund within 7 days of subscribe, unless more than 20% of the plan's searches have been used.
  • Upgrades charge the difference and keep the renewal date. Downgrades keep the renewal date; leftover searches move to an Extra Credits balance.
  • Cancel before expiry: remaining searches stay usable until the renewal date, then the plan does not renew.

That last point is the unused-credit trap on self-serve. The public FAQ never promises leftover monthly searches roll into the next cycle unless they were converted during a downgrade. Enterprise reserved searches are explicit: unused reserved credits do not roll over.

What happens when searches run out before the renewal date?

The bucket can empty mid-cycle. SerpApi's pricing FAQ tells buyers to turn on Automatic Early Renewal (or renew manually). Early renewal replenishes searches, moves the renewal date, and resets the cycle. That is a second full plan charge, not a few extra credits at the same unit price.

Enterprise billing is a different meter, documented on serpapi.com/enterprise (accessed 29 August 2026):

  • Base Enterprise is $3,750 per month.
  • That base includes 100,000 complimentary searches.
  • Extra on-demand searches: $7.50 per 1,000 ($15.00 with Ludicrous Speed, $30.00 with Ludicrous Speed Max).
  • Extra reserved searches: $2.75 per 1,000 ($5.50 / $11.00 with the same speed add-ons). Reserved volume is a commitment. Unused reserved credits do not roll over.
  • Blocked, errored, and CAPTCHA responses do not count. Legitimately empty queries do count. Pagination queries count as separate searches.

Self-serve and Enterprise disagree on pagination. The public FAQ says extra results in one response still cost 1 search. The Enterprise page says a pagination query is its own search. Teams that page through SERPs should price the Enterprise rule, not the self-serve FAQ.

The Enterprise page also lists SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, ISO 27001, "100% uptime," and "99.97% SLAs." Those strings are not on the self-serve grid.

Speed is a multiplier on the plan price. Legal Shield is a plan gate. They do not stack the same way.

Speed modes on 29 August 2026:

ModePriceClaimed speed vs the prior mode
Best Effort1× (default)Included
Ludicrous Speed2×2.2× faster average, 4.2× faster p99 vs Best Effort (n = 10,000 on serpapi.com/ludicrous-speed)
Ludicrous Speed Max4×9.6% faster average, 35.4% faster p99 vs Ludicrous Speed

Starter on Ludicrous Speed is $50 for the same 1,000 searches. Production on Ludicrous Speed Max is $600 for 15,000. The Ludicrous product page says the add-on can be switched on "for all paid plans." The pricing page says "Every plan can be combined with a speed mode." Treat Free as unverified for Ludicrous until the dashboard actually offers the toggle.

async must stay off when Ludicrous Speed is on. Google Trends, Trending Now, and the other engine docs repeat that async and no_cache must not be used together, and that async "should not be used on accounts with Ludicrous Speed enabled."

Legal Shield starts at Production on the public grid. The Legal Shield product page and serpapi.com/legal (page last updated 8 April 2026; both accessed 29 August 2026) put coverage at up to $2 million. The shield is included at Production and higher at no extra line item. Free, Starter, and Developer do not get it. Coverage is for lawful collection (scraping and parsing), not for how the data is used later. Claims are limited to United States state or federal law in a United States court. International companies can buy it; foreign-law claims are outside the shield.

ZeroTrace is messier. The pricing table marks ZeroTrace "Yes" from Cloud 1M upward. The Google Trends engine docs still label the zero_trace parameter "Enterprise only." The ZeroTrace product page (serpapi.com/zero-trace-mode) also says Enterprise. Cloud 1M and the Enterprise base share the $3,750 list price, which may be why the grid and the engine docs use different words. Confirm the toggle on the live plan page before treating ZeroTrace as included on a Cloud SKU.

They do. There is no cheaper Trends SKU. engine=google_trends and engine=google_trends_trending_now decrement the same monthly searches as google, google_light, YouTube, or eBay.

Durable limits from serpapi.com/google-trends-api (accessed 29 August 2026):

  • q is required. Interest-over-time (TIMESERIES, the default) and compared breakdown by region (GEO_MAP) accept up to 5 comma-separated queries. Related topics, related queries, and interest-by-region (GEO_MAP_0) accept 1 query.
  • Each query is capped at 100 characters. Topics can be knowledge-graph IDs such as /m/0663v.
  • geo defaults to worldwide when omitted. Per-query geos (comma lists) work only on TIMESERIES, must match the query count, and cannot include empty worldwide slots.
  • tz defaults to 420 (Pacific Day Time, −07:00). Range is −1439 to 1439 minutes.
  • gprop defaults to web search. Other values: images, news, froogle (Google Shopping), youtube.
  • date presets include now 1-H, now 4-H, now 1-d, now 7-d, today 1-m, today 3-m, today 12-m, today 5-y, and all (2004–present). Custom ranges use yyyy-mm-dd yyyy-mm-dd.
  • Cache TTL is 1 hour when every parameter matches. Cached searches are free. no_cache=true forces a live fetch and spends a credit.

Trending Now is a second engine. geo is required and defaults to the United States country code. hours defaults to 24 and accepts Google's 4, 24, 48, and 168 (7 days). category_id filters that board (example in the docs: 18 for Technology). Those category IDs are not the Explore cat list. A news_page_token on a Trending Now row is a follow-up call to engine=google_trends_news, which is another search credit.

A full Explore payload (timeseries plus related queries plus related topics) is three searches, not one, because data_type is a single enum per request. Hourly Trending Now polls should leave no_cache off.

For a side-by-side of Explore fields versus Trends MCP live boards, see SerpApi Trends API pricing.

SerpApi MCP is the REST API with a search tool in front. Hosted URL, from serpapi.com/integrations/mcp on 29 August 2026:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "serpapi": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.serpapi.com/YOUR_SERPAPI_API_KEY/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Auth is path-based (/YOUR_API_KEY/mcp, recommended) or Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY on https://mcp.serpapi.com/mcp. Default engine for the search tool is google_light. Google Trends is an engine parameter on that same tool, not a separate MCP server. Engine schemas are advertised as MCP resources at serpapi://engines and serpapi://engines/<engine>. Opt-in search_table and search_dashboard tools exist for hosts that implement MCP Apps (SEP-1865); hosts that do not support that extension ignore them. Markdown output: "md" is documented as cutting tokens (the page claims 50% on average).

One MCP tool call equals one SerpApi search when the call hits the network. Cached identical parameters still follow the 1-hour free-cache rule.

Trends MCP uses two hosts that are not interchangeable (docs.md, 29 August 2026). Cursor:

"trends-mcp": {
  "url": "https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp",
  "transport": "http",
  "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" }
}

Claude.ai Connectors must use the www OAuth host (no key in the connector):

https://www.trendsmcp.ai/mcp

Pasting the api host into Claude.ai, or putting a SerpApi-style key in the Trends MCP URL, is the usual misconfig. Cursor setup lives on MCP server for Cursor.

Request counting on Trends MCP (pricing.md, 29 August 2026):

CallWhat 1 request means
get_trends / REST get_time_series1 source + 1 keyword
get_growth1 source + 1 keyword; every percent_growth window in that call is included
get_top_trends1 feed type per page (limit / offset)

get_top_trends default limit is 25, min 1, max 200. MCP requires type. REST may omit type and return every feed in one response. HTML pricing on 29 August 2026 also prints Free as "Top 10 trends" and "12 months of history," paid plans as "All trends" and "Full history," a 7-day trial with card at checkout charged on day 8, failed calls free, and 9,409,234 API calls served. pricing.md does not repeat those Free caps. HTML markets "35+ data sources"; docs.md lists 15 keyword sources and 24 named live feeds; data-sources.md lists 20 live feeds; llms.txt opens with "plus 21 live feeds"; the live MCP get_top_trends enum lists 23 feeds and omits TikTok Trending Hashtags by Category. get_growth still lists python; the docs keyword table does not. Cite the split rather than picking one count.

SerpApi wins when the job is live SERP JSON: organic results, People Also Ask, local packs, shopping, Scholar, App Store, eBay, YouTube search, plus Google Trends as one engine among many. The MCP default (google_light) is built for that job. Legal Shield from Production is the compliance add-on most trends APIs do not sell.

Trends MCP wins when the job is keyword growth and live boards across Google, TikTok, Reddit, Amazon, Wikipedia, YouTube, news volume, npm, Steam, and store charts, with MCP plus REST on one key. Starter is $19 for 1,000 requests versus SerpApi Starter at $25 for 1,000 searches. Pro is $49 for 5,000 versus SerpApi Developer at $75 for 5,000. Annual billing on Trends MCP saves 20%. SerpApi's public grid has no annual SKU. Keyword alerts sit on Trends MCP Pro (50) and Business (250).

JobBetter meterWhy
Rank tracking, PAA, local pack, flights, mapsSerpApiThose engines exist; Trends MCP does not scrape SERPs
Google Trends Explore geos, 5-query overlay, DMA/CITY regionSerpApi google_trendsgeo lists, region, and tz=420 are first-class
Trending Now by country with news tokensSerpApi google_trends_trending_nowhours 4/24/48/168 and news_page_token
Multi-source 12M / 3M / YTD growth in one agent turnTrends MCP get_growthOne request can include every period; comma-separated sources
Live TikTok / Reddit / Amazon / Wikipedia boardsTrends MCP get_top_trendsNamed feeds, sort=rank_change, window 1d–30d
Cursor / Claude trend research without a SERP keyTrends MCPBearer on api.trendsmcp.ai; OAuth on www.trendsmcp.ai/mcp

SearchAPI (searchapi.io) is a different company with a different MCP header (X-MCP-Token). Plan-level dollars for that vendor sit on SearchAPI pricing. DataForSEO is pay-as-you-go Google Trends Explore; confirm current task prices on the vendor site, because this run did not re-fetch that grid.

SerpApi remains the right buy for production SERP coverage. Trends MCP remains the right buy for trend series and ranked live feeds. Paying SerpApi Starter only to call google_trends is the expensive way to get a 0–100 interest line.

FAQ

Is SerpApi cheaper than Trends MCP for Google Trends?

On raw monthly credits, no. Trends MCP Starter is $19 for 1,000 requests; SerpApi Starter is $25 for 1,000 searches, and each Explore data_type is its own search. SerpApi is cheaper only if those 1,000 credits are mostly SERP engines the trends API cannot return.

Are cached SerpApi searches really free?

Yes, when the query and every parameter match a result cached within 1 hour. The Google Trends and Trending Now docs both state that cached searches are not counted toward monthly searches. no_cache=true spends a credit to bypass that cache.

Does SerpApi sell unused searches at the end of the month?

Not on the self-serve FAQ. Cancel keeps remaining searches until the renewal date. Downgrade moves leftovers into Extra Credits. Enterprise reserved credits do not roll over. Emptying the bucket early triggers a full-plan early renewal if that toggle is on.

Can Claude or Cursor call Google Trends through SerpApi MCP?

Yes. Point the client at https://mcp.serpapi.com/YOUR_SERPAPI_API_KEY/mcp and pass engine google_trends or google_trends_trending_now on the search tool. That still bills SerpApi search credits. For trend-only agents, the Trends MCP Cursor block on https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp is the config that matches the cheaper meter.

Is SearchAPI the same product as SerpApi?

No. SerpApi is serpapi.com. SearchAPI is searchapi.io. They publish different SKUs, different MCP URLs, and different auth headers. Mixing the two is a common checkout error.

Sources