Updated Bing Search API Pricing

[brotherhood of LAN]

[microsoft.com...]

The existing Microsoft Bing Search APIs will increase in price effective May 1, 2023.

Search engines using Bing organic results that will potentially be affected: Ecosia, Duckduckgo, Brave, Qwant, Yahoo to name a few.

[tangor]

Ad Wallet Moans: Again?

[brotherhood of LAN]

Dunno about ad wallets, it does threaten the existence of a lot of alternative search engines though.

Though loosely 'alternative' when it's Bing results.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Surely having just one search engine would be best, search could be controlled more easily.

Non-western search engines are going in the other direction. Free APIs, open source applications, etc.

[Dimitri]

May be I am not reading it well, may be my maths are wrong, but it looks like a giant price increase :

$7 => $25 +257%
$1 => $10 +900%
$3 => $15 +400%
$4 => $18 +350%
$5 => $20 +300%
$6 => $22 +266%

This may be to pay the huge expenses required to run the Bing ChatGTP system.

[brotherhood of LAN]

@Dimitri, yep substantial increases.

Kagi is another search engine affected by it and came to the same conclusion wrt chatGPT
[twitter.com...]

It's unclear whether this is a universal increase for all API users.

One of the more surreal things I noticed reading about it, some search engine scraper service was talking about competing on price, as if it's even the same thing.

[Dimitri]

I don't want to be mean, but I always said this was a very bad idea to build a business plan which is exclusively relying on someone else.

Here, we have a perfect example of how bad this is to take a short cut when developing a business. You can get results fast, with little investment of time and money, but you are dependent of a third party, and finally have no control over your own business.

edit: and how many services / software were free for a long time, and all of a sudden became fee-based? This is only a repeat over and over, but most of people seem not to learn. There is no easy fast and free money.

[Dimitri]

edit 2 : the same will happen in 5 or 10 years from now, with AI. Businesses will rely on AI tools, these tools will be free or cheap, then become fee-based, and see their price increase a lot. Businesses will then collapse, and at the same time face all kind of lawsuits, for plagiarism, copyright infringements, false / mistaken information (and their consequences) etc...

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

In 5-10 years many traditional brick and mortar shops will be replaced with online delivery and only having a limited source for goods. Buyer options shrink when the economy claims businesses, and shutters them forever.

[tangor]

It is all dollars expended before the return comes in. Some might call it a cost of doing business.