TinyFish offers free search for AI agents, but costs remain

TinyFish, a web infrastructure company for AI agents, claims to offer free search and fetch services within certain limits, but the underlying costs for AI models to process retrieved content remain significant. The company argues that many teams underestimate the impact of retrieved content on model costs. In an internal evaluation conducted on June 2, 2026, TinyFish found that Firecrawl returned 36 times more characters than its own service for a Daily Mail article. The evaluation also showed that coverage rates varied, with TinyFish achieving 93% and Firecrawl only 62%. TinyFish attributes its free search pricing to its infrastructure, which separates charges for Agent and Browser usage. Search and Fetch remain free within their limits, with Search free at 30 requests per minute and 500 per hour, and Fetch free at 150 URLs per minute and 1,000 per day. Despite these free services, model processing costs still apply, as demonstrated by Artificial Analysis, which found model costs ranging from $8.04 to $21.65 per 1,000 tasks. TinyFish’s total cost of $9.30 per 1,000 tasks was the lowest among the tested configurations.