Microsoft greater than triples Bing Search API costs to recoup investments

Microsoft is all set to greater than triple the costs of its Bing Search APIs throughout all markets in what could be seen as an effort to recoup its investments into the search engine.

“The brand new pricing mannequin displays extra precisely the expertise investments Bing continues to make to enhance Search, together with newer experiences resembling Bing Visible Search and Bing Entity Search,” a Microsoft spokesperson mentioned.  

Final month, Microsoft introduced a $10 billion funding in OpenAI after experiences claimed that the corporate was planning to combine ChatGPT with its search engine.

Microsoft has been betting on the rising recognition of ChatGPT, because it showcases a brand new solution to search the web and responding to queries utilizing conversational language — totally different from what Google gives at present in the best way of hyperlinks.  

Google instructions greater than 91% market share within the web search class globally, in comparison with Bing’s abysmal 2.95% as of November 2022, in keeping with similarweb.com.

The hike in costs may also be attributed to the addition of OpenAPI’s ChatGPT engine to Bing.

“Prospects may also profit from new AI integrations that enhance the Bing search index expertise,” the spokesperson added.

Steep rise in Internet Search and Picture Search APIs costs

The brand new pricing will kick in from Could 1, 2023 for all Microsoft Bing APIs together with Picture Search, Video Search, Information Search, Visible Search, Entity Search, Internet Search, Autosuggest, and Spell Examine, the corporate mentioned in a weblog submit.

A comparability of the costs displays a 3x to 10x improve throughout totally different tiers for Bing Search and Bing Picture Search APIs.

Within the S1 class that permits 250 transactions per second, the brand new pricing for Internet Search stands at $25 per 1,000 transactions in comparison with simply $7 per 1,000 transactions.

In the identical class, Bing Picture Search’s new pricing stands at $25 per 25,000 transactions in comparison with simply $7 for a similar variety of transactions.

Within the S2 class, that permits 100 transactions per second, new Internet Search pricing stands at $15 per 1,000 transactions in comparison with simply $3 for a similar variety of transactions. Pricing for Bing Autosuggest for a similar class has been raised from $3 per 10,000 transactions to $15.

Different tiers together with the elective Bing Statistics Add-on may also see a 10X improve throughout all tiers.