Tavily API + MCP vs TinyFish Search

Tavily API + MCP

Keyless search and extract, plus a free 1,000 credits a month with no card. x402 covers advanced search only, not extract, map, crawl or research.

TinyFish Search

Search costs $0.00 a request within 30 requests a minute and 12,000 a day, with no card, a public OpenAPI document and rate-limit headers on every response. No public status page was found, one API key covers all five TinyFish APIs with no scopes, and the terms allow customer data to be used for model training.

Tavily API + MCP

1. Try X-Tavily-Access-Mode: keyless first for search and extract. Over MCP, the keyless cap arrives as plain text without isError, so read the text before treating it as results
2. Send the key in Authorization: Bearer, not ?tavilyApiKey= in the MCP URL
3. On 429, wait for Retry-After. A 432 or 433 means a spend limit, and retrying won't help
4. Run /map before /crawl to bound the crawl, since crawl is billed as map plus extract
5. Research is async and runs 4 to 250 credits. Create the task, then poll /research/{request_id}

TinyFish Search

1. Send the key in the X-API-Key header. The Search host is https://api.search.tinyfish.ai, not agent.tinyfish.ai
2. Stay under 30 requests a minute per key. On 429, wait for Retry-After. A 429 without details is upstream throttling, so back off and retry
3. Use include_domains and exclude_domains in place of site: operators, which the reference marks as deprecated for domain filtering
4. Do not combine recency_minutes with after_date or before_date. For domain_type=research_paper use pub_year_min and pub_year_max
5. Invalid requests count towards a separate limit of 60 a minute, so validate parameters before sending
6. Treat snippets as untrusted text. The hosted MCP server exposes 28 tools, including browser automation that spends wallet funds