Microsoft announces huge price rises for Bing API access
Access prices balloon by 1000% in some cases
Fresh from integrating ChatGPT into Bing, Microsoft has announced big price rises for access to its search API.
The price rises, which will apply from 1st May 2023, represent a leap of 1,000% in some cases.
"The new pricing model reflects more accurately the technology investments Bing continues to make to improve Search," Microsoft says on its website.
Last month, Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT and its underlying large language model (LLM) GPT-3
Last week, Microsoft released a new version of Bing which integrates ChatGPT and is currently being trialled by a limited number of users who signed up to test it, reportedly with mixed results.
Microsoft is aiming to boost its search engine's profile. As of December 2022, Bing only had about a 9% share of the search engine market, compared with Google's 84%. It also plans to integrate the AI chatbot into other products, including Office 365 and its Edge browser.
Bing Search API price rises
Microsoft offers access to Bing Search API in 10 instances (tiers), which differ according to transactions per second (TPS) allowed and products covered, such as search, news and images. There is a free instance, limited to 3 TPS, which is unchanged, but the pricing for all the remaining nine instances will increase markedly.
The premium S1 instance currently costs $7 per 1,000 transactions on the Web Search API at a maximum rate of 250 TPS, but from May that level of access will jump to $25. The price of optional Bing Statistics add-in will jump from $1 per 1,000 transactions currently to $10 in May - a 1,000% increase.
At the lower end, an S9 instance (limited to 30 TPS on the Bing Visual Search API) will leap from $3 per 1,000 transactions to $15.
For existing customers, the price changes will be applied automatically from 1st May, Microsoft says.
Most search companies lack the resources to create and host their own web indexes, although some, such as Mojeek, operate their own crawlers.
Others, such as Startpage, access Google's indexes via its API, before obfuscating its results for privacy. However, the best known privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo and most other third-party engines including Ecosia, SwissCows and Qwant, rely heavily on Bing's search API for their results.
We have contacted these companies to see how they will be affected by the price rises.
Twitter recently announced the end of free access to its APIs for academics and developers, and introduced a new limited free tier.