SerpApi alternative: how Fenlight compares

Fenlight is a Google results and AI-visibility API from Waggle. SerpApi is a search API that covers far more engines and result types than Fenlight does. This page sets out what each does, what each costs and what each limits, and says plainly where SerpApi is the stronger fit.

We make Fenlight, so read this with that in mind. Everything we state about SerpApi was checked 19 October 2026 against its own pages, which are linked below.

The short version

• Choose SerpApi if you need engines other than Google, Google products such as Maps, Shopping, News or Scholar as separate APIs, hourly throughput guaranteed by plan, an uptime SLA, or security attestations such as SOC 2 Type II.
• Consider Fenlight if your work is Google results plus AI visibility: what ChatGPT and Claude say about your brand, the Reddit and Quora threads Google ranks for a category, keyword ideas in Arabic, or MCP access.
• On published prices a Fenlight live results page and a SerpApi search overlap: $2.00 to $3.80 per 1,000 live pages, against $1.96 to $25.00 per 1,000 searches. The two are not counted the same way, so read the notes under the prices.

Side by side

Price per 1,000 Google results

Fenlight's credits come from a Vera plan (Vera pricing), at about $0.00029 to $0.00054 a credit, so a live results page (7 credits) costs the amounts below if you use the plan's credits.

SerpApi's plans, from SerpApi pricing:

SerpApi's lowest published price per 1,000 searches is $1.96 (Cloud 54M).

• Use matters. Both prices are monthly plans. The figures above assume you use all of a plan's allowance; Vera says unused credits roll over while your account is open.
• Counting differs. SerpApi's FAQ says the number of results in a response does not change what a search counts as. Fenlight charges a page per ten results: the first is 7 credits and each page after it 14, so depth 30 is three pages, 35 credits live. The local pack (+14 credits) and shopping (+7) are charged once per request, only if they return something.
• Repeats. SerpApi does not count cached searches, and its cache lasts 1 hour. Fenlight serves a repeat from your key's cache for 1 credit, for up to 24 hours by default, so send fresh: true when you need a live result.
• Failures. Neither charges for a failed request.

Where SerpApi is stronger

• Coverage. 121 APIs, across Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Baidu, Naver, Yandex, YouTube, Amazon, Walmart, eBay and others. Fenlight is a Google product, with other engines in beta or experimental.
• Google beyond the results page. SerpApi has separate APIs for Maps, Shopping, News, Images, Videos, Scholar and Trends, and for Google's AI Mode and AI Overview. Fenlight's local pack and shopping are add-ons to a results-page search.
• Published service levels. Guaranteed searches an hour on every plan, an uptime SLA of up to 99.97%, SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3 and ISO 27001, a U.S. Legal Shield and a ZeroTrace mode on its larger plans. Fenlight publishes none of these.
• Throughput. Guaranteed throughput from 200 to 640,000 searches an hour, by plan. Fenlight allows 60 requests a minute and at most 5 at once, per key.
• Client libraries. Integrations for a dozen languages and tools. Fenlight is an HTTP API with examples in Python, TypeScript and curl.
• A recurring free plan. 250 searches every month. Fenlight's free credits are granted once.

Where Fenlight fits

• AI answers. Ask ChatGPT and Claude a buyer's question, repeat it, and get a mention rate with a 95% interval, competitors, citations and cited domains.
• The radar. List the Reddit and Quora threads Google ranks for a category, with the list articles and videos beside them.
• Arabic and the Gulf. Keyword ideas from an Arabic seed, and Gulf cities by their Arabic names, among 139,425 Google locations.
• MCP. A remote server with 8 tools at https://fenlight.waggle.ae/mcp, listed in the official MCP registry as ae.waggle/fenlight.
• One key for Fenlight and Vera. The same Vera key and credit balance work on both.

What Fenlight does not do

• It is not a drop-in for SerpApi: the request and the response differ (see below).
• Google is the only engine in production. DuckDuckGo is in beta; Bing, Brave and Yahoo are experimental and often blocked.
• Fenlight does not measure Google's AI Overview (its AI Overview field says unmeasured) and has no AI Mode.
• Its device setting does not change the results, so mobile and desktop results cannot be compared.
• It has no result offset: you ask for depth results from the top, to 100.
• Not yet available in AI answers: Perplexity.
• It allows 60 requests a minute and at most 5 at once, per key.

Moving from SerpApi

This is a rewrite of the request and of the code that reads the answer, not a change of base URL. A SerpApi call, from its documentation (SerpApi Google Search API documentation):

curl -G https://serpapi.com/search \
  --data-urlencode "engine=google" \
  --data-urlencode "q=coffee" \
  --data-urlencode "location=Austin, Texas, United States" \
  --data-urlencode "gl=us" \
  --data-urlencode "hl=en" \
  --data-urlencode "api_key=$SERPAPI_API_KEY"

The same search on Fenlight, with your Vera key in FENLIGHT_API_KEY:

curl -X POST https://fenlight.waggle.ae/v1/serp/google \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FENLIGHT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
  "q": "coffee",
  "location": "Austin, Texas, United States",
  "gl": "us",
  "hl": "en",
  "depth": 10
}'

That is 7 credits for a live page. How the fields map:

Run the same few keywords through both for a week and compare the organic lists before you switch anything.

Sources

Every fact about another company on this page was read from its own pages, checked 19 October 2026. Prices and features change, so check the source before you decide.

1. SerpApi pricing: plans, prices, searches and throughput per plan, how searches are counted, the list of APIs, the SLA, certifications and integrations.
2. SerpApi Google Search API documentation: the endpoint, the parameters, authentication, the cache and the response sections.
3. Vera pricing: Vera's plans, the free credits and what happens to unused credits.