Google Vertex AI Search is deliberately left out of the price table on askFinz's own comparison, and it's worth saying why rather than quietly working around it: its pricing isn't a single per-query number. It charges per query, separately for the volume of data indexed, and differently again for grounding — three dimensions that a single per-1,000 figure would misrepresent no matter which way it was rounded. A prose page can be fair here where a table can't.
What each one is
Google Vertex AI Search is an enterprise search and retrieval product built on Google's infrastructure, aimed at companies that want to search their own documents, their website, or the open web with Google-grade relevance and grounding for generative answers. It's priced across several dimensions at once — queries, indexed data volume, and grounding calls each carry their own cost, which is standard for an enterprise platform product but not something that reduces cleanly to "$X per 1,000 searches."
askFinz runs its own crawled web index underneath a Search workspace, browser extension and research agents, at three flat, published rates: $0.75 as a top-up, $1.00 with the extension, $3.50 standalone — see pricing. It returns the matched passage and an answer together rather than a set of results to assemble into one.
Side-by-side
| Dimension | Google Vertex AI Search | askFinz |
|---|---|---|
| Access | Enterprise platform, built into Google Cloud | Search workspace, extension, and agents |
| Pricing shape | Per query, plus per GB of data indexed, plus grounding — three dimensions | $0.75 top-up · $1.00 with the extension · $3.50 standalone |
| What a call returns | Ranked results, with grounded generative answers as an added capability | The matched passage and an answer, together |
| Data source | Your own documents, your site, or the open web, depending on configuration | Its own crawled index of the web |
| Freshness | Depends on your own indexing configuration and cadence | Continuous reading, not a scheduled rebuild |
| Content structure | Configured per deployment | Filed as what it is — a filing, a standard, a listing |
What Vertex AI Search does well
For an enterprise that already runs on Google Cloud and needs search across its own proprietary documents alongside the open web — with the infrastructure, support, and compliance posture that comes with a major cloud platform — Vertex AI Search is a serious, capable product built for exactly that scope. Its multi-dimensional pricing reflects genuine complexity: indexing your own private data at scale, and grounding generative answers against it, aren't one cost, and Google isn't wrong to price them as three.
Where the work diverges
Vertex AI Search is built to be configured — pointed at your documents, your site, or the wider web, with pricing that follows how much you index and how you use it. That flexibility is real, but it also means the true cost of a deployment isn't knowable from a rate card alone; it depends on how much data you bring and how heavily you use grounding. askFinz's rate doesn't have that shape: it's a flat price per search against an index askFinz already reads, with nothing to configure or index yourself.
Looking for a Vertex AI Search alternative?
If you need enterprise search across your own private document store as well as the open web, with Google Cloud's infrastructure underneath it, Vertex AI Search is a genuine option for that scope. If what you need is grounded web answers at a flat, known rate with nothing to index yourself, askFinz is worth a look, inside Search and the workspaces built on it.
Which should you choose?
If your search need spans your own proprietary documents and requires enterprise deployment on Google Cloud, Vertex AI Search is built for that. If you want flat-rate web answers with the source passage included, askFinz is the simpler, more predictable fit.
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