We use Bing to search for ecommerce shipping addresses, and then analyze the results to identify whether a property is vacant or listed for sale. This helps us determine whether the address is being used as a "dead drop" for fraudulent purposes. The information is then fed into our fraud prevention model.

This price increase of 3.5 to 10 times the original amount is unacceptable and not justified.

$7 per 1000 searches was already incredibly expensive.. increasing it to $25 is a joke. It feels like now that they're going all-in with Bing then they don't want to deal with other competition.

Also worth noting that Bing doesn't allow small websites access the Microsoft Advertising network to help offset the cost. I've been told by a kind stranger that you need at least 10k searches per day to get access, that's $7500/month you now need to pay before you can even begin to monetize your service (and you'll probably spend tens of thousands before you reach the threshold). No idea how much you can expect to earn per 1000 searches with Microsoft Advertising if you're lucky/influential enough to get access, but I doubt it's much more than $25.

It will be very difficult to continue building on top of Bing search API platform.

Absolutely. With such an increase I have to think about switching. 2,5ct for a web search??

How much do you think it costs them? How much do you think they should charge?

What are the alternatives?

Glorified frontends like DuckDuckGo, Neeva, You.com and Perplexity never had much of a business case.

The same can be said for GPT wrappers like Jasper - the business equivalents of a mirage.

Google is 5$ per 1000 queries. I'll likely be switching. https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview

You're only allowed up to 10k queries per day, so you can't really use it to build a competing search engine.

I used their Programmable Search Engine (which doesn't have this 10k/day limit, but instead is client-side with other limitations), but the moment my Google-approved-non-profit was about to receive its first AdSense payout that would be donated to other charities, then they not only banned my AdSense account, but they also went a step further to ban my Programmable Search Engine account.. I have no idea why since it's impossible to get in touch with a human.

> You're only allowed up to 10k queries per day, so you can't really use it to build a competing search engine.

But Kagi.com uses Google (+ Bing), they almost certainly have over 10k queries/day

I don't think Kagi is close to that amount of traffic to be honest (although I'd love to be wrong, in which case they might bypass the limit by rotating between different Programmable Search Engine accounts).. I mean they require signup and even then limit to 50 searches/month unless you start paying $10/month, which is totally fair but a very high barrier of entry.

Over 1M requests a day: >> $200.00 per 1,000 transactions

After passing 1M requests/day, $5 per search is pretty steep. I guess this is a way of ensuring that their own 1st party traffic is prioritized.

I use bing in my app for image search, anyone have some alternatives they’d recommend? (I tried unsplash but their dev approval process just never worked for me and I couldn’t get to a human)

Update: after using bing, moved to pexels, which seems quite nice

Here's hoping DDG has a special agreement with them

The new pricing is a joke. I don't use anything fancy and just needed some web results. I don't see this justified at all.

Yikes. I’m going to have to close my app that uses the Bing API, as this makes it completely unsustainable.

almost 10x'd their pricing.

because they actually think they have a shot at being a contender as a search engine.

They may have forgotten that they actually have to get there first.

I thought Bing and AI would be different, but this feels like a classic Microsoft ecosystem fuck-up.