Tavily Alternatives Compared — Cost-Optimizing Search and Extraction APIs for AI Agents

AI agents now run dozens or hundreds of web lookups per task, and Tavily's credit-based pricing has become a real cost driver. This post compares the major Tavily alternatives (Firecrawl, Brave Search, Exa, Serper, Jina Reader, SearXNG) on price, features, migration effort, and industry shifts, then suggests the best combination per workload.