Perplexity Search API vs Tavily API + MCP

Perplexity Search API 25

No x402, MPP or L402 in the docs, pricing page, OpenAPI or llms.txt (0). $5 per 1,000 successful requests, $1 with Fast Search, published without a login, with failed and rate-limited requests not billed (20). Usage is prepaid with a card on the billing page, and no free allowance was found. The console playground needs no key but is a page for a person, not an API allowance (0). A person signs up in the console. The Stripe Projects route provisions a project, key and credits from a terminal, but needs a person's Stripe account with a payment method and a $10 minimum purchase (5 of 20, as on the Decisions API listing). 0 + 20 + 0 + 5 = 25.

Tavily API + MCP 75

Official x402 at x402.tavily.com sells advanced search only, $0.01 in USDC on Base. An unpaid POST to /search returned 402 on 1 November with an x402 version 2 envelope offering the exact scheme on eip155:8453 for 10000 units (0.01 USDC), and a second agent-pay option on aws:base for 0.016, described as advanced mode. Extract, map, crawl and research aren't sold over x402 (15). Credit costs per endpoint and $0.008 a credit pay as you go, published without a login and unchanged on 1 November (20). 1,000 free credits a month, no card, re-read on 1 November (20). Keyless search and extract with the X-Tavily-Access-Mode: keyless header, plus the x402 route, so an agent needs no human signup (20).

Perplexity Search API 80

Graded on the hosted lines, for POST /search and the hosted MCP server. status.perplexity.com, on incident.io since 10 September 2026, has an API component with an RSS feed and a JSON summary. There is no separate Search component (20). In the 90 days from 8 August the feed lists 'Investigating API issue' on 13 August, resolved with no detail, a usage-based billing issue on 3 September, and on 9 October elevated errors on the website, app and Computer, where the API 'remained operational throughout'. Minor only, with the caveat that history before the migration may be incomplete (20). The Search API is limited to 50 query units a second with a burst of 50 on every tier, and the other APIs publish QPS and token limits per tier (15). 429 carries Retry-After and an error.type, the SDKs retry 429 and 5xx twice honouring Retry-After, the Search best-practices page shows backoff, and failed or rate-limited searches are not billed. Searches have no side effects (15). The FAQ says Perplexity does not guarantee uptime, failure frequency or recovery time, and the terms carry no SLA (0). No beta label on the Search API, launched on 25 September 2025 (10). 20 + 20 + 15 + 15 + 0 + 10 = 80.

Tavily API + MCP 90

incident.io status page at status.tavily.com with separate API, MCP and website components (20). One incident in the 90 days from 3 August, website degraded performance on 17 September 2026, and none since per the status feed re-read on 1 November. The API and MCP showed 100% per the 1 October check (30). Published limits, re-read on 1 November, 100 requests a minute on development keys and 1,000 on production, crawl 100 and research 20 task creations on both (15). 429 carries Retry-After and the docs say to use that value and the status code rather than parse the message. Since October a 434 tells non-paying plans that live fetching with max_age_hours is refused under load, with the advice to retry or omit it (15). The pricing page lists 'Enterprise-grade support and SLAs' for the custom Enterprise plan but publishes no SLA terms, per the 17 October check, and none were found in the docs index or terms (0). GA (10).