After investing $10 billion in OpenAI, Microsoft has successfully obtained the GPT model and built the Bing Chat application. The highly sought-after chatbot has given Microsoft the confidence to catch up with Google and raise prices for developers and partners.
This is why Bing Search API prices have increased: Simply put, developers need to pay Microsoft to access the API for querying content from Bing Search.
A typical example is the DuckDuckGo search engine, which does not have its own crawler, so they have signed a cooperation agreement with Microsoft. Every time a user searches, DuckDuckGo queries the Bing search results and presents them to the user.
Microsoft offers various billing policies, including a free plan. Free instances can only call the Bing Search API 1,000 times per month, which is equivalent to only 1,000 searches.
Other instances are chargeable, and the prices have increased. Microsoft’s reason for this is that the new pricing model more accurately reflects the technological investment Bing continues to make to improve search. It sounds like Microsoft spent an additional $10 billion on Bing and is now looking for developers and partners to pay more to offset this investment.
The specific pricing strategies are as follows:
Free instance: The price is unchanged, and the API call volume is 1,000 times per month.
Chargeable instance S1: The original price was $7 per 1,000 calls, and the new price is $25, an increase of 214%.
Chargeable instance S2: The original price was $3 per 1,000 calls, and the new price is $15, an increase of 400%.
Bing Statistics Add-in: The original price was $1 per 1,000 calls, and the new price is $10, an increase of 900%.
Bing API based on the large-scale language model ChatGPT: If the number of daily requests is less than 1 million, the price is $28 per 1,000 requests. If the number of daily requests exceeds 1 million, the price is $200 per 1,000 requests.
The new prices will take effect from May 1, 2023, but it is not yet clear whether clients who have signed long-term agreements with Microsoft will be affected, such as DuckDuckGo. If they have to raise prices, DuckDuckGo may not be able to survive.