Microsoft is increasing the price of the Bing Search API with some prices rising by a factor of ten. This will impact developers and organizations who use Bing Search API in apps to retrieve data. 

The price rise encompasses Bing Web Search API, Bing Image Search API, and Bing News Search API and will take effect on May 1, 2023.

Microsoft said:

"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."

This presumably reflects the US$10 billion Microsoft has invested in OpenAI, and the beginning of the integration of the AI products created by OpenAI, such as ChatGPT, into Microsoft products.

Some of the price rises are as follows. For Instance S1, 250 transactions per second (TPS), Bing Web Search and Bing Image Search used to cost $7 per 1,000 transactions will now cost $25 per 1,000 transactions.

S2 instances at 100 TPS, Bing Autosuggest goes from $3 per 10,000 transactions to $15 per 10,000 transactions. For S6, Web Search goes from $3 per 1,000 transactions to $15 per 1,000 transactions.

The optional Bing Statistics Add-in sees one of the steeper rises, changing from $1 per 1,000 transactions to $10 per 1,000 transactions.

Microsoft has also announced new more flexible terms related organizations who want to present Bing API results with their own large language models; Tier 1 with fewer than one million requests per day can pay $28 per 1,000 transactions; Tier 2 with over one million requests per day pay $200 per 1,000 transactions.

The interesting question is what this means for developers. Having to pay up to ten times more for search results will make some applications not worth selling, so developers will either have to charge a lot more, or find a different search API.

More Information

Bing Search API Price Info

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