Microsoft retired the Bing Search API on 11 August 2025. If your product was built on it — for search results, grounding, or general web lookup — that retirement forced a migration, and Microsoft's replacement is a different shape of product at a different price point (Microsoft publishes more than one figure for it, so none is quoted here). This page is for anyone weighing where to move to. The honest starting point: askFinz isn't a drop-in swap of one API endpoint for another — it's a different kind of product, built on an index it owns.
What each one is
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 much of the search-API market — and a fair number of AI products doing web grounding — was quietly built on top of it. When it was retired, all of that had to move somewhere.
askFinz isn't a search-results API to wire into an existing integration. It runs its own crawled web index, read continuously, with a Search workspace, browser extension and research agents built directly on top — so instead of returning a page of links for your application to process, it returns the matched passage and an answer.
Side-by-side
| Dimension | Bing Search API (retired) | askFinz |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Retired 11 August 2025 | Live today |
| What it returned | A page of ranked results and ads | The matched passage and an answer |
| Integration model | Drop-in API call | A product — Search workspace, extension, agents |
| Ownership | Microsoft's own index | An index askFinz owns and reads |
| Freshness | Whatever Bing's own crawl cadence was | Continuous reading, not a scheduled rebuild |
| Content structure | Ranked links, undifferentiated | Filed as what it is — a filing, a standard, a listing |
What changed when it retired
The retirement removed the budget option most of this market was built on. What replaced it is priced and shaped differently, and Microsoft has published more than one figure for the new product, which is part of why a single number for it isn't quoted here. Whatever you migrate to, it's worth treating this as a real architecture decision rather than a find-and-replace on an API key — the products filling this gap aren't identical to what was retired, and they aren't identical to each other either.
Where askFinz fits
If what your product actually needs is grounded web answers rather than a page of links to parse and rank yourself, askFinz is a genuinely different option worth evaluating alongside a like-for-like API replacement. It doesn't sell raw index access as a search-results API the way Bing's did — it's a product, not a swap-in endpoint — but for teams open to that shape of integration, Search returns an answer grounded in an index askFinz reads continuously, not a page of results borrowed from someone else's crawl.
Which should you choose?
If your application needs a literal drop-in replacement for a results-in, links-out API call, evaluate the direct successors on their own published pricing and shape — they're built for exactly that migration. If you're open to rethinking the integration around grounded answers instead of raw results, askFinz is worth a serious look, built on an index it owns rather than one it's renting.
See how the index works or read the fuller case for owning an index.
Join the beta to try it against a real question.