At a glance
Bing Search API vs askFinz
Row by row — what a call buys on each side.
| Compared on | Bing Search API | askFinz |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Retired 11 August 2025 | Live today, in beta |
| What it returned | A page of ranked results and ads | The matched passage and an answer, together, with the address it was read from |
| Integration model | A drop-in API call | A product — workspaces, a browser extension, a desktop app and research agents, on one sign-in |
| Index ownership | Microsoft's own | An index askFinz reads and holds |
| Rate | No longer offered | $0.75 top-up · $1.00 with the extension or a paid plan · $3.50 standalone |
| Content structure | Ranked links, undifferentiated | 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.
askFinz rates as published on pricing. No figure is quoted here for Microsoft's replacement product: Microsoft publishes more than one, and picking whichever suited this page would not be a fair comparison.
What the Bing Search API was
A straightforward call-in, results-out API: send a query, get back a page of ranked web results, ads and related data to render or process yourself. It was cheap enough that a substantial part of the search-API market — and a fair number of AI products doing web grounding — was built on it without anyone thinking hard about the dependency. When it was retired, all of that had to move.
What askFinz is
askFinz runs its own crawled web index, read continuously rather than fetched per query. 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.
What the retirement actually taught
The retirement removed the budget option most of this market was standing on, and it did so on Microsoft's timetable rather than anyone else's. That is the part worth carrying forward into whatever you migrate to: a product built on a rented index has a dependency it does not control, and the terms of that dependency are not a technical detail.
Be honest about the migration you are actually doing
Treat this as an architecture decision, not a find-and-replace on an API key. The products filling this gap are not identical to what was retired, and they are not identical to each other. A like-for-like API successor is the low-risk path and there is nothing wrong with taking it. askFinz is only worth evaluating if grounded answers, rather than raw results, were what your product actually needed all along. If they were, the thing to weigh is not the endpoint but the shape: an answer with the passage and the address it was read from, records filed as the kind of document they are with the identifiers that make them citable, and a set of workspaces, a browser extension and a desktop app on one index and one sign-in. No like-for-like successor sells any of that, because none of them is selling a product — they are selling the call that was retired.
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 a like-for-like API successor if
- Your integration is a results-in, links-out call and you want to change one endpoint, not your product.
- You render results to users as a results page, where the list is the deliverable.
- You need SERP-shaped extras — ads, related searches, answer boxes — that a grounded-answer product does not produce.
- Migration time is your binding constraint and rearchitecting is not on the table this quarter.
- You need an API to call from your own code. askFinz sells no such call.
Choose askFinz if
- What your product needed was a grounded answer, and the list of links was only how you got there.
- You would rather not repeat the dependency — an index someone else can retire on their own timetable.
- You want the passage the answer came from, with the address it was read from, alongside the answer itself — including inside the PDFs and filings a results page links to without having read.
- A flat, published rate matters after a migration forced by a pricing and product change you did not choose.
- The answer needs somewhere to go — Research with sources attached, Storage, 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 Bing Search API and askFinz.
5 questions · open one to read the answer
11 August 2025.
No. It is a set of workspaces, a browser extension, a desktop app and research agents on one sign-in — not a search-results endpoint. If you need a literal endpoint swap, the direct successors are built for that migration and askFinz is not.
Microsoft publishes more than one figure for it, and no single number is quoted here for that reason. Check Microsoft's own pricing page.
$0.75 as a top-up, $1.00 with the extension or a paid plan, $3.50 standalone, per 1,000 searches, as published on pricing.
No. It reads and holds its own index and does not query another engine.
See how the index works, or read the fuller case for owning an index. Join the beta and try it against a real question.