Here’s how the huge Bing API price increase will affect you

Compared to the current prices, it’s a little over a 1,000% in increase.

by Rafly Gilang

Rafly is a journalist with growing experience, ranging from technology, business, social, and culture. A holder of the Romanian government scholarship, his writing has been published in several… read more

Published on February 20, 2023

Like Twitter which just got ridden of its free tier of API pricing plans, Microsoft is in hot water for increasing the prices for Bing Search APIs. Starting May 2023, developers can expect massively skyrocketing prices for this feature by up to 10 times the current prices—a definitely uneasy decision in this time.

The reason? Well, Microsoft believes the new polarizing announcement is made to align the market demands with offered services in the wake of the new AI-powered Bing, although a 1,000% increase still seems a little over too much.

“The price increase will apply to all markets. Starting May 1, 2023., you’ll be charged the new price for all Microsoft Bing APIs. We periodically assess the value and pricing of our services to meet market demands and align the pricing of our products and services with customer consumption trends and preferences. The new pricing model reflects more accurately the technology investments Bing continues to make to improve Search.”

There are 10 available pricing plans. One is the free issue which includes Bing’s image, news, video, visual, web, and entity searches, as well as autosuggest and spell check, billed at 1,000 transactions free per month for all markets for only 3 tps (transactions per second). Others vary from $10 to $200 per 1,000 transactions and $25 per 25,000 transactions under faster tps rates.

Read along to find out how expensive the Bing API cost for URLs.

How much does the Bing API cost for URLs?

You can see the full prices in this table. Each paid plan includes an optional Bing statistics add-in at $10 per 1,000 transactions, which was previously only costing $1.

“Bing Search APIs are invoiced based on number of transactions (also known as API calls). These plans are pay-as-you-go and doesn’t incur additional cost for complex queries and more than 10 results (up to 50 results in most cases).”

For those with large language models, Microsoft presents two tiers of pricing plans. For less than 1 million requests per day, the plan costs $28/1,000 transactions. For those with over 1 million, it starts from $200/1,000 transactions.

How badly is Microsoft’s plan to increase Bing API’s cost for URLs affecting you? Let us know in the comments!