Microsoft has announced that the prices of its Bing APIs are going up sharply, in some cases by up to 1,000 percent.
Microsoft is busy giving its Bing search engine a second life. With an investment of more than 10 billion in OpenAI and the integration of these AI models into Bing, the search experience should be greatly improved. This investment should be recouped left or right. Probably with ads but also with the API. Prices for the Bing API are going up by as much as 1,000 percent.
Starting May 1, 2023, the new fees will go into effect and they will be substantially higher. This probably also means that the Bing API will soon feature the new Bing AI capabilities. Microsoft has ten different tiers in terms of fees, with tiers varying by solution and the amount of transactions you can do per second. The Bing API can be used for search, as well as news and images.
The cheapest tier is and always will be free, allowing you to do 3 transactions per second. The next tier currently costs $7 per 1,000 transactions with a limit of 250 transactions per second, starting in May this rate shoots up to $25. Optional Bing statistics goes up in price from $1 per 1000 transactions to $10 per 1000 transactions. For image search, the price goes from $3 per 1,000 transactions to $15 per 1,000 transactions.
Problems looming for privacy search engines like DuckDuckGo?
In addition to Google and Bing, there are other search engines, often aimed at greater privacy. Think, for example, of DuckDuckGo. These search engines generally do not have their own index and crawlers, but use Google and Bing’s APIs. With this price increase, that may well cause problems. If DuckDuckGo sees its costs increase by 500%, it remains to be seen if they can stay afloat.
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