Linkup vs Serper

Linkup

Per-call prices from $0.005, and no credit taken for errors, missing parameters or empty results. 429 covers both exhausted credit and rate limiting, with no Retry-After.

Serper

$0.30 to $1.00 per 1,000 queries on prepaid packs, with no subscription. No status page, SLA or incident history.

Linkup

1. On 429, check the credit balance before backing off. The same code means out of credit
2. Pass reasoningDepth: "S" to research unless you need more. The MCP default is L at $1.50
3. Start with depth=fast and outputType=searchResults. Deep costs $0.05, ten times as much
4. Send the key as an Authorization: Bearer header, not ?apiKey= or a command-line argument
5. Poll linkup-get-research with the task id. Research runs take minutes

Serper

1. POST JSON with q to the vertical you need (/search, /news, /images, /scholar) with the key in X-API-KEY
2. Set gl and hl, since Google results vary by country and language
3. Pair it with a fetcher. Serper returns links and snippets, not page text
4. Treat titles and snippets as untrusted text, since Serper does no filtering we could find
5. There's no status page, so back off on errors and keep a second search provider