A verification email is sent during registration and each time you login. Check spam or junk folders, as these messages can sometimes be filtered. If the email is still not received, contact support from the email address used during registration so the issue can be investigated.

This error typically occurs when special characters (such as &, ', or .) are entered in the company or name fields during registration. Remove any special characters from these fields and try again.

Navigate to the Billing section under Settings and click “Update Payment Method”. You’ll be redirected to a Stripe page where you can enter your new payment details.

Navigate to the Manage account section under Settings and click “Delete my account”.

Before deleting your account ensure that all invoices have been paid and all plans have been cancelled. When all requirements are met you will be asked to provide your credentials to confirm the deletion.

Yes. Custom plans are available for high-volume usage or specialized requirements. Contact us via our custom plan form.

To make sure you pick the right plan, identify your core needs and goals. The Search plan covers web, news, image, and video search with local enrichments, rich data and LLM context for LLMs and agents. The Answers plan adds AI-powered answers grounded on a single search or multiple searches for better accuracy & reduced hallucinations. Both plans include recurring monthly credits to get you started. For autocomplete and spelling correction, the Autosuggest and Spellcheck plans are available separately.

If your company needs a bespoke, large-data solution, please contact searchapi-support@brave.com.

The credit card serves as an anti-fraud measure to protect Brave from bad actors. On a prepaid plan it is also the card we charge for the credits you buy, whether you add them yourself or through auto-reload. On an existing postpaid plan it is used to process charges for any usage beyond your included monthly credits.

Yes. After you’ve activated a plan, you will need to generate a new key in the API Keys section - this applies to all plans. You may have up to 10 keys per plan.

On a prepaid plan, further usage draws down your prepaid balance, and the service pauses once that balance reaches $0 — see the auto-reload questions below to keep it topped up. On an existing postpaid plan, additional usage is charged on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Either way you can set usage limits under Usage limits to control costs, and usage and remaining credits are visible in the dashboard at any time.

It is prohibited to retain any and all data received through the Brave Search API. If you need to store the results or train an LLM, please reach out to our team at searchapi-support@brave.com.

If you already have access to one of our existing, postpaid plans, nothing will change with your billing or access. Everything will remain exactly the same. If you choose to, you can add a new prepaid plan (meaning you could have both a postpaid and a prepaid plan), or you could cancel your existing postpaid plan and activate a prepaid one.

Please note that if you decide to cancel a postpaid plan, you won’t be able to activate it again. After cancelling, you will only see the prepaid option.

Yes, you can activate a new, prepaid version of a plan where you already have a postpaid version. However, note that if you do so the $5 in free credits will be removed from the existing postpaid plan and only appear for the new prepaid plan. Basically, you won’t see double $5 credits on the same plan with two different billing models.

You can’t change an existing plan’s billing model, but you can easily cancel an existing postpaid plan and activate a new prepaid plan. Please note that if you cancel a postpaid plan so you can use a prepaid plan instead, you’ll need to issue a new API key under the new plan.

Unfortunately, no, our billing system doesn’t allow for this. If you’ve cancelled a postpaid plan, the only option for restarting the service will be a prepaid plan.

Unfortunately, no. If you previously created a Brave Search API account but did not activate a plan, and are now opting to activate, the only option available will be a new prepaid plan.

Per our Terms of Service, Brave Search API users do not have a right to a refund of unused API credits. Please be mindful of how many prepaid credits you purchase for your account. Also note that the credits you purchase do not expire, so you can always hold unused credits for a later project. Free monthly credits are the exception — those are replaced each month rather than carried over.

The prepaid balance is immediately visible in the dashboard’s Credits balance tab. Here, you’ll see the current balance, the spending for each plan, total free credits, and the settings for your auto-reload.

You can also set alerts for when your balance gets low in the Usage alerts tab, and you can configure usage alerts at the plan level. If you set a usage alert, Brave will send you an email once your usage crosses the threshold that you’ve set. You can also set an auto-reload so the API system can automatically purchase and add credits to your account once your prepaid balance is fully depleted, or reaches a credit threshold that you’ve set.

Your monthly usage limit will consist of the amount you entered plus the free monthly credits we offer for every Brave Search API plan. Each prepaid plan receives $5 in free credits each month.

The prepay amount and usage limit are two different concepts. Your prepay amount is essentially your account’s balance that you can draw from by making API calls. By contrast, a usage limit caps how much a plan can spend in any given month. If you set a usage limit that’s lower than your prepaid amount, the remaining prepaid balance would simply roll over to the following month. You’ll find these under Usage limits.

Yes, if you exhaust your prepaid balance your service will be paused — further API requests are rejected until you add more funds. To ensure your service is not disrupted, you can set up auto-reload. With auto-reload, the API system will automatically purchase and add credits to your account once your prepaid balance is fully depleted, or reaches the threshold you’ve set. The credit card on file would then be charged for whatever number of additional prepaid credits you’ve set for your account, up to your monthly auto-reload limit.

For example: if you set auto-reload to trigger when your balance drops below $30, with $50 as the amount to add, then each time your balance falls below $30 we add $50. The amount we add is the fixed figure you chose — we don’t calculate the difference needed to reach a target balance.

To set an automated top-up, visit the Credits balance tab and turn on auto-reload. You set two figures: the balance we watch for (“When balance drops below”) and the fixed sum we add each time it’s crossed (“Amount to add”, minimum $5).

Separately, a monthly limit caps how much auto-reload can charge your payment method in any given calendar month. It applies to auto-reload only — top-ups you make yourself are not counted against it. If a reload would exceed what’s left of that limit we add only the remainder, and skip the reload once less than $0.50 of it is left.

Setting a monthly limit is optional. If you leave it empty — or remove it at signup — auto-reload is uncapped, and will keep topping up every time your balance crosses the trigger. To cap it, set the monthly limit to the most you’re willing to be charged in a month.

Most often, a failed auto-reload will be due to your payment method, as there may be some reload restrictions imposed by your bank. Unfortunately, Brave cannot override these restrictions. If you’re encountering a failed auto-reload, the easiest fix will be to enter a different payment method (i.e. one that allows automatic reloads) and try again.

Also note that some banks will require a human approval for a top up, otherwise the top up will remain in an incomplete state. In a case like this, you will be notified via email of the incomplete top up, and you can log in to your bank to approve the payment and continue using the API.

All Brave Search API plans include $5 in free credits, which renews every single month. If you’d like to access this $5 credit without adding a prepaid balance, you can enter a credit card at signup and set your prepay amount to $0. This will allow you to get the $5 free credit without actually paying any money.

Note that even if you intend to set your spend to $0, the service will still need to complete the automatic credit card check with a $0 or $1 charge hold. This is strictly a measure to prevent credit card fraud — any $0 or $1 hold placed on your credit card will be immediately refunded.

We do not offer a standalone free plan. However, each plan receives $5 in free credits that renew every single month, which allows users to run proofs of concept and power small-scale projects. This $5 in free credit is equivalent to (for example) 1,000 queries per month on the Search plan.

Also note that this $5 in free credits applies to each plan. With four available plans (Search, Answers, Autosuggest, and Spellcheck) you could feasibly access $20 in total free credits each month ($5 per each of the 4 plans).

Certain cards may not authorize successfully with our payment flow. The decline can come from either the card issuer or payment processor and doesn’t always provide a detailed error message.

Common causes include:

• Insufficient funds (minimum $1 required for authorization)
• Card restrictions on international or recurring transactions (commonly occurs with Indian bank cards)
• Authentication failures during the authorization process

Recommended solutions:

• Try a different Visa or Mastercard credit or debit card, which works reliably with our authorization flow
• Sign up for the Brave Search API through our AWS Marketplace listing, which supports additional payment methods (Paid only)

The Brave Search API is powered by Brave Search, a fully independent search engine serving tens of millions of queries per day.

Try Brave Search at search.brave.com.

Yes, every search engine that has its own index necessarily has its own Web crawler. The Brave Search crawler does not advertise a differentiated user-agent because we must avoid discrimination from websites that allow only Google to crawl them. However, if a domain or page is not crawlable by any search engine (it has a noindex tag), or if it is not crawlable by googlebot, then Brave Search’s bot will not crawl it either.

Brave Search’s crawler is partially powered by information provided by users enrolled in the Web Discovery Project (WDP) option in Brave browser’s search settings, which is an off-by-default (aka opt-in), privacy-preserving system. WDP has multiple mechanisms to prevent Brave from knowing who is contributing what (WDP is also open-source for auditing and inspection by anyone).

Yes. Brave Search fetches millions of web pages every day, offering extensive coverage of recent events around the world.

Brave Search API offers a ranked list of web pages that are publicly available; this list also includes information to support why the web page is relevant to the query (for instance via query-dependent snippets based on the content of the web page).

The Brave Search API does not grant any rights to third-party content such as web pages. Customers who access URLs displayed in the Brave Search API must ensure their access to those web pages complies with the copyright terms of the page publishers.

If you are getting unexpected or suboptimal results via the API and would like to share some feedback, please include the following details in your email:

• List of HTTP request parameters sent
• List of HTTP headers sent, if any
• Plan name used for request

If you are comparing results with Brave Search and see a difference, please also include:

• From drop down setting in Brave Search:
  • Search country
  • Safesearch
  • Time filter
  • Local result
• From page settings in Brave Search:
  • Search language
  • Fallback mixing
  • Discussions
  • Summarizer

Please avoid sending any tokens.