Microsoft Will Soon Start Charging $40/Month And Up For Its Bing Search API
While Microsoft announced these general changes today, it did not release any specific information about the transition timeline and pricing structure for users who need more than 20,000 queries per month.
According to the Bing team, this change will give developers “access to fresher results, improved relevancy, and more opportunities to monetize their usage of the Search API.”
Until now, free access to its API gave Microsoft’s search engine a bit of a competitive advantage, as Google’s free custom search API only includes 100 queries per day.
It seems like charging for API access is becoming quite the trend among the major search players, though. Google, for example, also just started charging its high-volume users for access to its Maps API. Google’s Translate API, too, transitioned to a paid model late last year.
