Serper pricing is prepaid credit packs, not a monthly search subscription. On 29 August 2026 the serper.dev homepage listed four paid rows: $50 for 50,000 credits at $1.00 per 1,000 queries (50 QPS); $375 for 500,000 credits at $0.75 per 1,000 (100 QPS); $1,250 for 2.5 million credits at $0.50 per 1,000 (200 QPS); and $3,750 for 12.5 million credits at $0.30 per 1,000 (300 QPS). New accounts get 2,500 free queries with no card. Credits last six months. Tax sits outside those stickers. Serper is a Google SERP JSON scrape. It is not a trend API. Trends MCP is the cheaper bill when the job is keyword growth or live boards for agents: $0 for 100 requests per month, or $19 for 1,000.
What does each Serper credit pack cost?
The public grid on 29 August 2026 is four top-up rows plus a free trial, all copied from serper.dev. There is no monthly toggle. Pack names on the cards are Starter, Standard, Scale, and Ultimate. Asterisks on the dollar amounts point to sales tax, VAT, and GST sitting on top.
| Pack | Price (ex-tax) | Credits | Stated queries | Price per 1,000 | Default QPS | Credit life |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free trial | $0 | 2,500 | 2,500 | $0 | Not printed on the free CTA | Not printed |
| Starter | $50 | 50,000 | 50,000 | $1.00 | 50 | 6 months |
| Standard | $375 | 500,000 | 500,000 | $0.75 | 100 | 6 months |
| Scale | $1,250 | 2,500,000 | 2,500,000 | $0.50 | 200 | 6 months |
| Ultimate | $3,750 | 12,500,000 | 12,500,000 | $0.30 | 300 | 6 months |
Each pack's credit count matches the "Submit N queries" line on the same card, so one successful response is billed as one credit on this grid. The FAQ says credits come off only after a successful response, and new queries stop when the balance hits zero. Failed-call billing is not spelled out the way Trends MCP states "failed calls are free" on pricing. Do not assume Serper refunds a 5xx.
The FAQ also prints a concurrency note that applies to Ultimate: 300 queries per second is the default, which Serper estimates as about 15,000 to 18,000 searches in one minute, with a higher cap available on request. Starter, Standard, and Scale print 50, 100, and 200 QPS on the cards themselves. Response time copy is 1 to 2 seconds in general, 2 to 4 seconds when a Google retry is needed.
Serper's own homepage still claims prices "up to 10 times cheaper than competitors such as SerpAPI and Bright Data." That line is marketing, not a single ratio. SerpApi's public grid on the same day lists Starter at $25 per month for 1,000 searches ($25 per 1,000) and Searcher at $725 for 100,000 ($7.25 per 1,000). Against Serper Starter at $1.00 per 1,000, those two SerpApi rows are 25× and 7.25×, not a flat 10×. SerpApi is also a monthly allotment with hourly throughput, Legal Shield from Production, and cached or failed searches free. Serper is a prepaid bucket with no cache. The products are not interchangeable even when the SERP JSON looks similar.
How long do Serper credits last?
Credits are valid for six months on every paid card. That clock is the part of Serper pricing most monthly SERP buyers miss. A $50 Starter pack that sits unused still ages out. There is no annual billing switch that stretches the window.
Refund copy splits across two first-party pages, both fetched on 29 August 2026. The homepage FAQ: a full refund within 7 days of the initial credit purchase unless more than 20% of the credits have been used. The Terms of Service (updated 29 May 2024) are stricter on timing: the request must land within 7 calendar days of the first payment for Serper API credits, and less than 20% of provided credits may be used. A later top-up is not clearly covered by that "first payment" sentence. Read the terms before treating a second pack as refundable.
Payment methods on the homepage FAQ are Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and PayPal. Terms add that Serper is a business-to-business service, is not affiliated with Google, and is governed by the laws of the United Kingdom. One account per customer is a license rule; extra signups to stack free 2,500-query grants are prohibited.
The homepage also prints a vendor claim of "900,000+ companies and developers using Serper API." Treat that as marketing copy from the same fetch, not an audited customer count.
Does Serper return Google Trends, or only SERP JSON?
Serper returns live Google result pages as JSON. On 29 August 2026 the homepage playground exposed ten surfaces: Search, Images, News, Maps, Places, Videos, Shopping, Scholar, Patents, and Autocomplete. The Search demo payload included knowledgeGraph, organic (with position, title, link, snippet, sitelinks), peopleAlsoAsk, and relatedSearches. Location copy in the FAQ is country plus language. The FAQ states the API queries Google on each call and does not cache.
That is a SERP scrape. Ranked organic links, shopping cards, and patent hits are the product. Interest-over-time series, multi-source growth, and live non-Google boards are not on those ten tabs.
The same homepage JavaScript posts playground traffic to https://google.serper.dev/w/{type} (the {type} values in that bundle include search, videos, shopping, scholar, patents, and autocomplete). That path is the on-site demo, complete with a reCAPTCHA token. It is not a documented production contract. serper.dev has no public /docs URL (that path 404'd during this run). CrewAI and other wrappers often show POST https://google.serper.dev/search with an X-API-KEY header; those snippets are third-party. Confirm the authenticated path in the Serper dashboard after signup rather than copying a wrapper.
There is also no first-party MCP on serper.dev. The homepage JavaScript bundle for the landing page contains zero mcp strings. Community stdio wrappers exist on GitHub. They are not Serper's hosted server.
Trends MCP is the other job. Cursor remote config from docs.md on 29 August 2026 is url plus transport: "http" plus a Bearer header, not a local npx process:
"trends-mcp": {
"url": "https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp",
"transport": "http",
"headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" }
}
REST is POST https://api.trendsmcp.ai/api with the same Bearer key. Three tools: get_time_series (legacy alias get_trends), get_growth, get_top_trends. Default get_top_trends limit is 25, max 200, counted per feed type and per page. get_growth can pass several percent_growth windows in one request and still bill one request per source plus keyword. That packing is the opposite of a SERP credit that fires once per Google page.
Source counts on Trends MCP still disagree across official files fetched the same day. HTML pricing markets 35+ data sources, Free as top 10 trends plus 12 months of history plus 24-hour delayed data, and a live counter of 9,504,947 API calls served. docs.md tables list 15 keyword sources (no python) and 24 live feed names, including the four by Category boards. data-sources.md lists the same 15 keyword sources and only 20 live feeds, omitting all four by Category boards. llms.txt says "plus 21 live feeds." The MCP get_growth schema still lists python. Do not flatten those numbers to one count.
When is Trends MCP cheaper than buying Serper credits?
Serper is cheaper than most monthly SERP APIs for raw Google JSON at $1.00 per 1,000 on the $50 pack, and cheaper still at $0.30 per 1,000 on Ultimate. It is the wrong SKU when the agent needs "what is climbing on TikTok / Amazon / Google Trends" instead of "what does this query rank for."
| Job | Serper (29 Aug 2026 homepage) | Trends MCP (same-day HTML + docs) |
|---|---|---|
| Organic Google SERP JSON | Yes. Ten surfaces on the playground. | No. Not a SERP scraper. |
| Live Google Trends board | Not on the ten tabs. | get_top_trends type Google Trends. Default 25 rows. |
| Multi-source keyword growth | Not the product. | get_growth with comma-separated sources; all windows in one request. |
| TikTok / Amazon / Steam / GitHub boards | No. | Named live feeds on docs (24 names there; 20 on data-sources.md). |
| First-party Cursor MCP | No hosted MCP on serper.dev. | Remote HTTP JSON above. |
| Free tier | 2,500 queries, no card. Credits do not reset monthly. | 100 requests/month, no card. HTML: top 10, 12 months, 24h delay. |
| Paid entry | $50 prepaid / 50k credits / 6-month life / 50 QPS. | $19/month for 1,000 requests, or $16/month at $192/year. |
| Billing shape | Top-up. No monthly subscription copy. | Monthly or yearly. 7-day trial, card at checkout, charged day 8. Failed calls free. |
| Cache | FAQ: none. | Not a SERP cache product. |
A content agent that asks Cursor for rising queries should use the Google Trends MCP for Cursor path, not a Serper credit. A RAG bot that needs today's organic links still needs a SERP API. Many stacks will hold both. The waste is paying Serper (or SerpApi) to approximate a trend board.
Trends MCP monthly rows from the same HTML fetch: Free $0 / 100; Starter $19 / 1,000 ($16/mo, $192/year on the yearly toggle); Pro $49 / 5,000 ($39/mo, $468/year); Business $199 / 25,000 ($159/mo, $1,910/year). Yearly copy on the toggle is "2 months free." Keyword alerts: Pro 50, Business 250. Paid plans: all trends, full history, real-time. Hitting the quota returns 429; there is no overage SKU.
Serper remains the better buy for high-QPS Google JSON. Ultimate's 300 QPS default is a different scale from Trends MCP's monthly request caps. Do not pick Trends MCP for a 15,000-search-per-minute SERP crawl.
FAQ
How much does Serper cost per 1,000 queries?
$1.00 on the $50 Starter pack, $0.75 on $375 Standard, $0.50 on $1,250 Scale, and $0.30 on $3,750 Ultimate, excluding tax, as of the 29 August 2026 homepage. The free grant is 2,500 queries. There is no public monthly subscription row.
Do Serper credits roll over past six months?
No. Every paid card on that fetch prints "Credits valid for 6 months." Unused credits in a pack still expire. The homepage does not describe a renewal that extends old credits.
Is Serper cheaper than SerpApi?
On a raw per-1,000 sticker, yes, against SerpApi's public monthly grid fetched the same day (Starter $25 / 1,000 searches). SerpApi adds monthly throughput SLAs, Legal Shield from Production, and free cached or failed searches. Serper adds prepaid volume, no cache, and a six-month credit clock. Run the job, not the 10× homepage slogan.
Does Serper include a Google Trends API?
Not on the ten playground surfaces listed on 29 August 2026. Those tabs return SERP JSON (organic, images, news, maps, places, videos, shopping, scholar, patents, autocomplete). For a live Google Trends board or get_growth on google search, use Trends MCP.
Can Cursor talk to Serper over MCP the same way as Trends MCP?
Not via a first-party Serper MCP. serper.dev did not document a hosted MCP URL on this run. Trends MCP's Cursor snippet is remote HTTP with transport: "http" against https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp. Community Serper wrappers exist; they are a different install from Serper's own API.
Sources
- Serper homepage pricing, FAQ, playground surfaces, accessed 29 August 2026
- Serper Terms of Service, updated 29 May 2024, accessed 29 August 2026
- SerpApi pricing, accessed 29 August 2026
- Trends MCP HTML pricing, pricing.md, docs.md, data-sources.md, and llms.txt, all accessed 29 August 2026 (same-day first-party files; body links already point at the live site)