Octen

What is Octen?

Octen is search infrastructure for AI applications. Developers call its APIs to get ranked web results with highlights and optional full page content, so a model can work from current information without crawling or parsing pages itself. The set includes Web Search, Broad Search, Image Search, News Search, Business Search, an Extract API for turning URLs into clean Markdown, text and multimodal embedding models, and ready-made workflows such as Answer, Deep Research and Grounded Generation. Billing combines pay-as-you-go usage with an optional monthly plan that reserves search throughput. Every new account starts on a Free plan with up to 10 queries per second and receives $5 in free balance on sign-up. The Builder, Pro and Max plans raise the limit to 50, 200 and 500 queries per second, and paid plans carry an uptime SLA. Teams building agents, answer engines and retrieval pipelines use it as the web layer behind their models.

Use cases

• Give AI agents live web search
• Build an answer engine with citations
• Extract clean content from URLs
• Create embeddings for semantic search and RAG
• Run source-backed deep research
• Look up companies and people for due diligence
• Track news on a topic

Who it's for

• AI developers
• Agent builders
• Startups
• Data and ML teams

Why use Octen

• Results come back as ranked highlights and clean content, so there is no crawling or parsing step before the model sees them.
• Pay-as-you-go billing means you only pay for the calls you make, and a monthly plan is optional.
• One API key covers search, extraction, embeddings and research workflows.
• Paid plans reserve throughput with a dedicated priority queue and an uptime SLA.
• New accounts get $5 in free balance without a credit card, which is enough to test requests.

Octen features

• Web Search and Broad Search APIs
• Image Search and News Search
• Business Search with company and people profiles
• Extract API returning clean Markdown
• Text embedding models in three sizes
• Multimodal embeddings across text, images and video
• Answer and Deep Research applications
• Grounded generation of images and videos
• Auto Search with choice of model providers
• Per-key rate limits
• Prompt caching discounts on Auto Search

How to get started with Octen

1. Create an account and receive the $5 free balance on the Free plan.
2. Create an API key and call a search, extract or embedding endpoint.
3. Feed the ranked results, highlights or full content to your model as context.
4. Add credits to unlock Base, or subscribe to a QPS plan when you need reserved throughput.
5. Monitor usage as charges are deducted from your balance in real time.

Octen limitations

• Video Search is an invite-only beta
• Free plan allows up to 10 queries per second on Web Search
• Deep Research supports a single concurrent request
• Once your credits are used up, the API responds with 403 errors until you add more

Octen pricing

Yes, Octen has a free plan.

Octen plans

• Free

  $0

  per month

  • Up to 10 queries per second on Web Search
  • $5 free balance on sign-up
  • Default tier for every new account

• Base

  $0

  per month, unlocked when you add credits

  • Up to 20 queries per second on Web Search

• Builder

  $2,099/month

  listed at $2,999, 30% off

  • Up to 50 queries per second
  • Dedicated priority queue
  • Guaranteed throughput and SLA
  • Standard email support

• Pro

  $13,999/month

  • Up to 200 queries per second
  • Dedicated priority queue
  • Guaranteed throughput and SLA
  • Standard email support

• Max

  $33,999/month

  • Up to 500 queries per second
  • Dedicated priority queue
  • Guaranteed throughput and SLA
  • Standard email support

Plans as listed on the official pricing page on 24 Oct 2026. Prices can change and may vary by country or exclude tax. Check the official pricing page.

Octen alternatives

The main Octen alternatives listed on Debuly are Tavily, Exa, Brave Search API, SerpApi, Firecrawl and Parallel. The table compares pricing and platforms; order is A–Z.

1. 

   Brave Search API

   Search API built on Brave's own web index, with LLM Context, web, news, image, video and place endpoints for apps and AI agents.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   PaidVisit Brave Search API (official site)
2. 

   Exa

   Web search API for AI agents and apps that returns relevant passages with citations, billed pay-as-you-go from a free monthly credit.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit Exa (official site)
3. 

   Firecrawl

   Web data API for AI agents: search, scrape, crawl and interact with websites and get clean content back, with a free tier.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit Firecrawl (official site)
4. 

   Parallel

   Pay-as-you-go web APIs for AI agents: search, extract, deep research, cited answers, monitoring and entity lists.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit Parallel (official site)
5. 

   SerpApi

   Real-time search engine results API that returns Google and other SERP data as structured JSON, handling proxies and CAPTCHAs.

   Developer platformsMarketing and SEOResearch and search
   FreemiumVisit SerpApi (official site)
6. 

   Tavily

   Web search, extraction and crawling API built for AI agents and RAG, with a free tier of 1,000 credits a month.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit Tavily (official site)

Octen FAQ

Sources & verification

Facts on this page come from the official sources below, each with the date we read it. Written by Debuly; the vendor did not review this page.

Image credits

• Logo: from octen.ai · fetched 24 Oct 2026 · Vendor trademark, used only to identify the product; removed on request
• Cover: none collected yet, so a generated tile is shown.

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