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Brave Search API now lets AI agents pay per request with x402

Brave announced on November 12, 2026 that its Search API now accepts pay-as-you-go payments through x402, an open protocol built on the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code. Developers and AI agents can buy a single search for $0.005 in USDC on the Base network, with no account, signup or API key. For anyone building agents, it means a search call can be paid for on the spot instead of through a key and a plan set up in advance.

What’s new

From Brave’s announcement and its agent payments guide:

  • No API key: the signed payment is the credential. A request without payment gets a 402 Payment Required response with the price and payment details; the client signs a USDC payment for that amount and retries, and the results come back with a receipt of the transaction on Base.
  • Price: $0.005 per request ($5 per 1,000), the same as Brave’s published API rates, for every endpoint on offer. Brave is covering gas fees on Base for a limited time.
  • Network: USDC on Base, through a facilitator Brave runs itself. Brave says other networks and stablecoins are coming soon.
  • Separate host: paid requests go to https://search.agent.s.brave.app, which uses the same paths as api.search.brave.com and forwards query parameters unchanged.

The service’s llms.txt lists what is for sale:

Path Price per request
/res/v1/web/search $0.005
/res/v1/llm/context $0.005
/res/v1/news/search $0.005
/res/v1/videos/search $0.005
/res/v1/images/search $0.005
/res/v1/local/place_search, /pois, /descriptions $0.005

Not sold this way yet: the Answers API, which bills per query and per token, and Autosuggest and Spellcheck, which cost less than the fee for settling one payment. The Summarizer is not sold because Brave has deprecated it. Those still need an API key.

What it means for developers

If your agent needs search only now and then, you no longer have to sign up, store a key and pick a plan: fund a wallet and pay per call. Brave suggests purl, a command-line x402 wallet from Stripe. The example in Brave’s llms.txt is:

purl --max-amount 5000 'https://search.agent.s.brave.app/res/v1/web/search?q=rust'

--max-amount is the most purl will pay, in the token’s base units (USDC has six decimals, so 5000 is $0.005). Set it to the price you expect so a client can’t be charged more than you meant.

We sent an unpaid request to the LLM Context path while writing this. It came back as 402 with a payment-required header carrying a base64-encoded JSON offer: x402 version 2, network eip155:8453 (Base), an amount of 5000 and the USDC contract as the asset. Any x402 client that reads that header can pay it, so you are not tied to one SDK.

For machine discovery, GET /openapi.json on the same host serves an OpenAPI 3.1 document of every paid path, with an x-payment-info extension per operation. Brave says the 402 response, not that document, is the final word on what a given request costs, and a payment is checked against the price of the path it is sent to.

How it compares

The usual route to a search API is an account, an API key and a plan before the first call. Brave’s x402 host removes those steps: the first paid call is the whole setup. The trade-off is that you hold and fund a crypto wallet on Base, and at launch that is the only network and stablecoin supported.

It also points the other way from some recent moves on agents: United Airlines is blocking third-party AI agents from booking flights, while Brave is building a door for agents to walk through and pay.

Sources