Is the same not true of 50/100 free browser-based searches?
When a real user is going through the trial period, those 50 searches get them familiar with the tool. When their usage runs out, they're forced to decide if they want to pay to continue or invest the work into replacing it.
AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.
Browsing some of the forums where people discuss their search setups is enlightening. The current favorite strategy is to have your AI set up access to all of the different search providers with free tiers and then rotate among them to avoid having to pay for anything.
Defeats the purpose of the free tier.
Interesting, is this for personal use or is it some business application? In any event I'd imagine the same can be done via agents using a browser.
> AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.
That is a crazy amount of compute just to conduct a search.
It's the people downloading open weight models and running OpenClaw (or this month's trend) who don't care how many tokens it takes because it only costs them electricity.
Real businesses aren't doing stuff like this.
It's the home users who use LLMs as a hobby. Some power users pay for Exa and other services. A lot of home LLM users will go to unbelievable lengths to not pay for anything that isn't hardware. Seeing what your agent can do is half the fun for them.
Set one of them against a goal and tell it to not bother you until it has the answer. They will do some weird things as they go.
But those are an offer and are used to advertise and get more users. Not to mention, as the "50/100" says, they're capped.
I don't get it, what other sense is there? Seems like 50 daily API queries would be lighter weight than 50 browser queries. And with an API you can require a key (aka subscriber).
> But those are an offer and are used to advertise and get more users.
"Try our search engine from your browser" / "Try our search engine from your agent setup" These both seem like user acquisition pitches. The real difference with programmatic access is that you'll likely get users hitting the cap and paying for more usage if they like the product.
> as the "50/100" says, they're capped.
... which is exactly what I was suggesting for API use.
Obvioulsy the TYPE and RETURNS of some cost.
>These both seem like user acquisition pitches. The real difference with programmatic access is that you'll likely get users hitting the cap and paying for more usage if they like the product.
50 searches from the web feel way more generous to a user than using the agent (most wont even hit them), hitting the 50 cap in like 10 minutes, and being negative about the whole experience.
>... which is exactly what I was suggesting for API use.
Which is exactly why it wouldn't work well for API use with such cap.