If you want an unofficial API, most data providers usually charge $4/1000 queries or so. By unofficial, I mean they just scrape whats in Google and return that to you. So thats the benchmark I use, which means the cost here is around 2x that.
As far as I know, the pricing really hasnt gone down over the years. If anything it has gone up because Google is increasingly making it harder for these providers
I'm not sure that's correct -- the first party APIs are priced per query but BD is per 1k results. Not immediately obvious what they count as a "result" tho.
It's really poor wording. Bright Data does indeed consider 100 results in a single request to be a single billed "result" event, billed at $1.5/1000 requests.
I always set 100 results per request from Bright Data, and I can see my bill indeed says `SERP Requests: x reqs @ 1.5 $/CPM` (where `x` is the number of requests I've made, not x * 100).
For serper.dev, they consider 10 results to be 1 "credit", and 20 to 100 results to be 2 "credits". They bill at $50/50,000 credits, so it becomes $1/1000 requests if you are okay with just 10 results per request, or $2/1000 requests if you want 100 results per request.
(Both providers here scale pricing with larger volumes, just trying to compare the easiest price point for those getting started.)
As far as I know, the pricing really hasnt gone down over the years. If anything it has gone up because Google is increasingly making it harder for these providers