At a glance
Brave Search API vs askFinz
Row by row — what a call buys on each side.
| Compared on | Brave Search API | askFinz |
|---|---|---|
| What you buy | Programmatic access to Brave's own index | Workspaces, research agents, a browser extension and a desktop app, on one sign-in |
| What comes back | Search results; direct answers on a separate tier | The matched passage and an answer, together |
| Rate per 1,000 searches | $5.00 · answers tier $4.00 | $0.75 top-up · $1.00 with the extension or a paid plan · $3.50 standalone |
| Independence | Own index, not a Google or Bing relay | Own index, read continuously |
| Consumer product behind it | Brave Search, used by people in a browser | Search and the other workspaces, plus the extension and desktop app, on one sign-in |
| Content structure | Ranked results and snippets | Filed as what it is — a judgment with its jurisdiction, a standard with its revision, a filing with its reference number |
Swipe the table sideways to see both columns.
Brave rates as published on its own pricing page, verified 12 August 2026. askFinz rates as published on pricing. Check Brave's current page before relying on these figures.
What Brave Search API is
Brave Search API gives developers programmatic access to Brave's own web index — the same one behind the consumer Brave Search engine, built independently of the two dominant engines rather than assembled from their results. It returns ranked search results, with direct answers available on a separate tier, priced per call.
What askFinz is
askFinz reads and holds its own web index too, read continuously rather than rebuilt on a schedule. A question returns the matched passage together with the answer, with the address it was read from, and what the index holds is filed by what each document actually is — a judgment with its jurisdiction, a standard with its revision, a filing under the reference number the issuing body published it with. Documents are read as documents: PDFs, Word files and slide decks are read page by page rather than linked to. On top of the index sits a set of workspaces — Search, Research, Chat, Code, News and more — plus a browser extension and a desktop app, all on one sign-in. askFinz does not sell index access as a standalone feed or API — the index exists to power the product, not to be resold.
The part where they are the same
Most of this comparison set is a relay: a service that sends your query to Google or Bing and parses what comes back. Brave is not one of those, and it should not be argued against as if it were. Building and running a general web index is a genuinely hard, expensive, long-horizon problem, and Brave did it. Where the ownership argument lands squarely against a SERP API, against Brave it lands nowhere.
The part where they differ
What is left is what a call ends at, what it costs, and what shape the thing is that you buy. Brave hands back a ranked results page or a short answer, and something on your side still turns that into the thing a person reads. askFinz hands back the passage and the answer together, with the address it was read from, because the reading happened before the question was asked.
Two further differences are worth naming, because neither is a matter of price. First, what the index holds is filed by what each document is: a judgment arrives as a judgment with its jurisdiction, a standard with its revision, a filing under the reference number its issuing body published it with — the identifier that a ranked results list discards on the way in, and the thing that lets an answer cite the right record rather than a page about it. Second, what sits on the index is not an endpoint but a set of workspaces, a browser extension and a desktop app on one sign-in, so the answer has somewhere to go after it arrives. Nothing sold as a search API in this comparison offers either.
A component, or a place to work
One of these is a call you build against. The other is somewhere you open and use.
Choose Brave Search API if
- You need search inside your own application. askFinz does not sell a call you can make.
- Independence from Google and Bing is a requirement you can be asked to demonstrate, and Brave's is well documented and long established.
- You want raw ranking to work with — your own re-ranking, filtering or blending on top of a general web index.
- Brave's privacy positioning matters to your users or your procurement process.
- You need a vendor with a public track record at scale rather than one in beta.
Choose askFinz if
- You want the passage and the answer together, without building the layer that turns results into prose.
- Rate matters: $0.75–$3.50 against $4.00–$5.00 per 1,000 (as of 12 August 2026).
- Search is something people at your company do rather than something your code calls.
- You want results organised by document type — a judgment with its jurisdiction, a standard with its revision, a filing with the reference number its issuing body gave it — rather than as an undifferentiated ranked list.
- The answer needs to carry on into Research, Storage or a project, with the rest of the workspaces, the browser extension and the desktop app on the same index and the same sign-in.
FAQ
Questions people ask
The things people actually ask before choosing between Brave Search API and askFinz.
5 questions · open one to read the answer
No. Brave built its own, independently of both. It is one of the few in this comparison where that is true.
Because owning an index is the start of the argument, not the end of it. The rest is what a call returns and what it costs, and those still differ.
askFinz, at published rates: $0.75–$3.50 per 1,000 against Brave's $4.00–$5.00, verified 12 August 2026. Brave's is an API rate and askFinz's is a product rate, so they are not identical units of the same thing.
No. askFinz is a workspace, an extension and research agents; there is no standalone index API.
Not quite. Brave's answers tier returns a short direct answer at $4.00 per 1,000. askFinz returns the answer with the matched passage it came from and the address it was read from, at $0.75–$3.50, and the record it cites is filed as the kind of document it is rather than as a ranked hit.
See how the index works, or read the fuller case for owning an index. Join the beta and try it against a real question.