Comparison
Dataswap vs Tavily: two ways to ground an agent
If your only requirement is “give my agent web results, cheaply, today”, Tavily is a good answer and has a free tier we do not match. The comparison gets interesting when someone asks where the data came from.
Tavily
A search, extraction and crawling API built for LLM applications, with a published free tier and per-credit pay-as-you-go pricing.
Dataswap
A licensed-data API with grounding, extraction and answer-engine measurement on the same key, and a signed receipt on the response.
Side by side, with sources
| Axis | Dataswap | Tavily |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Free plan gives you an account and an API key, with no included credits. | 1,000 API credits per month, with “No credit card required”.source |
| Pay as you go | Credits are prepaid on a plan. 1 credit = $0.002. | “$0.008 / credit”, described as pay only for what you use.source |
| Where inference runs | Synthesis runs on models we host in the EU. Requests are not sent to third-party model vendors, and the receipt records inference: eu-only. | Not found on the pages we checked (4 August 2026) |
| What the API covers | Search, News, Maps, Images, Shopping, People-Also-Ask, AI Overview and AI Mode, plus Amazon, business listings, reviews from three platforms, backlinks, on-page and the analysis routes. | Documents /search, /extract, /crawl and /map, and a /research endpoint described as “Tavily’s comprehensive research API for in-depth analysis”.source |
| Crawling a site you name | Not offered. We read up to ten URLs passed to POST /v1/extract/schema and extract a catalog from a storefront URL; nothing follows links or discovers pages. | Documented: /crawl and /map are described as “intelligent sitegraph navigation and extraction tools”.source |
| Signed provenance artefact per response | A signed manifest per response: source class, bot_evasion: false, inference location and a SHA-256 of the payload — verifiable at POST /v1/provenance/verify with no API key. | Not found on the pages we checked (4 August 2026) |
| Retention | Responses are never stored. A usage record per call is kept for the life of the account; truncated request arguments and the originating IP are kept for 30 days, then erased. | Not found on the pages we checked (4 August 2026) |
Their per-credit price and ours are both list prices from public pricing pages, read on the date at the bottom of this page — but a credit does not mean the same thing on both sides. Compare on the calls you will actually make, not on the unit.
When Tavily is the better choice
You want to start without paying
1,000 credits a month, no card. Our Free plan has no included credits, so the first Dataswap call costs money. For a prototype that may decide it on its own.
The job includes crawling a site
Their reference documents /crawl and /map for navigating a site and pulling it apart. We do not crawl anything: we read licensed data and up to ten URLs you name. If part of your pipeline is “go through this website”, that half of the work has no equivalent here.
Your stack is already wired to them
If your agent framework already has a working Tavily integration and your only complaint is the bill, switching for provenance you have not been asked for is not a good trade. Come back when procurement asks.
You need per-credit pay-as-you-go without a plan
They publish a $0.008 per-credit PAYG price. We sell credits prepaid on plans, which is simpler to forecast and less flexible when your usage is spiky.
When Dataswap is the better choice
Someone will eventually ask where the data came from
Licensed sourcing, no anti-bot evasion, and a signed receipt per response that says so. That question arrives late in a sales cycle and is expensive to answer retroactively.
Your prompts must not leave the EU or reach a model vendor
Reranking and synthesis run on models we host ourselves inside the EU, and the receipt records it as inference: eu-only.
Grounding is not the only thing you need from the web
Reviews, shopping, business data, backlinks, on-page, entity cards and answer-engine measurement live behind the same key and the same envelope. One integration instead of four.
You want the token budget enforced by the API
token_budget is part of the request, and the pack is cut to it before it reaches you — the trimming code you would otherwise write and maintain is where grounding usually goes wrong.
Questions about this comparison
- Do both return the same thing?
- Both return web content shaped for a model. Our POST /v1/context returns blocks with a title, url, a relevance score and a token count, trimmed to the budget you set, plus a provenance receipt. The response contracts are different, so treat this as two products for one job rather than a drop-in swap.
- Is Dataswap cheaper?
- That depends entirely on your mix of calls, and we are not going to answer it with a number that flatters us. Both list prices are on this page; a composed Dataswap call costs several credits, a plain search costs one.
- Can I use both?
- Yes, and for a while that is the sensible thing to do. Point the same prompts at each, compare the packs your model actually cites, and keep the one that wins on your queries.
How we checked
Every claim about Tavily on this page was read from their own public pages on 4 August 2026. Where we could not find something, the table says so rather than assuming it does not exist. Vendors change their pricing and their positioning; if you find a row that is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
- Tavily pricing https://tavily.com/pricing
- Tavily API reference https://docs.tavily.com/documentation/api-reference/introduction
- Dataswap pricing https://dataswap.io/#pricing
We publish no latency or quality benchmarks of our own, for this or any comparison, because we have not run a study we would be willing to defend. Measure both on your own queries.
Keep reading
Put the prism to work.
Create an account and get your API key — no card required. Start on the six live bands and the twelve inference tools; the eight new capabilities land on the same key as they ship.