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Bing Search API Pricing Update
- raymondgh 4y agoI love this part > You do not need to take any action; this change will take effect automatically and be reflected in the next billing cycle after the change is activated.
- mkl95 4y agoHow is this legal?
- bushbaba 4y agoOne benefit of a multi-year offline contract is that it often sets the prices and outlines when, where, and how these prices can change. Offering a bit more stability.
- somenameforme 4y agoRead the terms and conditions. Actually don't. It's page after page of a mixture of feel-good and CYA obfuscation for something that can be put into two simple sentences: "We can do anything at any time for any reason. You can do nothing and have no recourse against anything we do." Click accept to continue!
- adastra22 4y agoCustomers hate this one simple trick
- krono 4y agoWorks both ways, or at least it did this one time: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/updated-russian-man-turns-tables-on-bank-changes-fine-print-in-credit-card-agreement-then https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/updated-russian-man-turns-ta...
- giancarlostoro 4y agoThis sounds like fraud honestly, although the bank screwed itself here by not reading.
- krono 4y agoOh yeah I wouldn't recommend anyone try this themselves, just find it hilarious that the bank fell for it and that it even held up in court. One of those things that could have only ever happened in that country, I suppose.
- patmcc 4y agoOh I'm sure it'll be well covered in the T&C; likely they've sent all customers an email as well.
- Salgat 4y agoThe only other option is to cut your service off which is usually the worst option available for a SaaS.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y agoMicrosoft forgot to include the word "Massive" in the page title.
- refulgentis 4y agolol
- rajnathani 4y agoA list of price increases by FAANG / big tech companies: - Google: Google Workspace [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34826453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34826453] - Microsoft: The above (yes this is related to ChatGPT/OpenAI, so this isn't a perfect example) - Netflix: The cracking down on account sharing It is an interesting trend, where in this market downturn large tech companies are flexing their pricing power a lot. This will work in the short and medium run, but not for longer as in the long run / soon tech is going to easily be highly decentralized.
- Paraesthetic 4y agoSo this how they are paying off that open AI investment
- th3o6a1d 4y agoAre these prices real? Seem like they're off by a factor of 100.
- marban 4y agoNot familiar with the API but am I right that 1 transaction = 1 query?
- pablo24602 4y ago> a transaction is a successful Bing API call request Seems accurate.
- dgrin91 4y agoGotta pay off that $10B somehow
- gundmc 4y agoI assume large scale customers like ddg have negotiated terms that won't be impacted by this hike
- ColinHayhurst 4y agoI have an inkling you might be wrong there, but can't say why.
- oefrha 4y ago> We periodically assess the value and pricing of our services to meet market demands and align the pricing of our products and services with customer consumption trends and preferences. Wonder where’s the customer with a preference for a 4x-10x price hike. Also interesting how the LLM API pricing jumps from $28 to $200 per thousand transactions when you cross the 1M requests per day threshold.
- riku_iki 4y agoit could be opposite: less customers so they need to hike prices to sustain.
- qup 4y agoMaybe they're trying to soft-enforce a max-usage. Maybe there's not enough total bandwidth to support the predicted user-base or something.
- mtsr 4y agoMaybe they don’t want others to be able to launch successful products built on top. This would be one way to force people into negotiations with MS. Or the $28 is their lossleader and the $200 closer to their desired margin.
- autoexec 4y ago> We periodically assess the value and pricing of our services to meet market demands and align the pricing of our products and services with customer consumption trends and preferences. It's only natural that when your search product has been making headlines for being untrustworthy, inaccurate, and creepy/threatening that you'd start charging excessive amounts for access to it. I'm sure all their data on "customer consumption preferences" indicate that consumers prefer paying higher and higher prices to consume products of questionable value.
- nerdponx 4y agoI assume this is a deliberate strategic shift to push out a large portion of their customers while extracting more value from the remaining customers. What's unclear is whether this is a purely mechanical decision to maximize value extracted from the customer base (it's easy to construct scenarios in which it's more profitable to serve fewer customers at higher prices), or if this is some kind of move towards brand protectionism by making Bing search seem more exclusive, or if it's actually just really expensive to run an LLM behind every single search query. Or it's an attempt to kill off DuckDuckGo and drive people towards using Bing directly.
- jfoster 4y ago> or if it's actually just really expensive to run an LLM behind every single search query. It's definitely expensive to run an LLM behind every single search query, but it doesn't seem like these changes are related to that, with the exception of the "Information on a new way to use the Bing APIs: Bing API Pricing with Large Language Models " section below the rest of the pricing changes.
- weberer 4y ago>Or it's an attempt to kill off DuckDuckGo and drive people towards using Bing directly. I didn't even consider that. That would be truly evil of them.
- aembleton 4y ago
- benatkin 4y agoPennies per request, rather than requests per penny. Reminds me of when color laser printers first came out and on the cheap ones instead of pages per minute it was minutes per page.
- rhacker 4y agoI'm guessing Sydney helped them come up with this document...
- sebazzz 4y agoAs DuckDuckGo uses Bing, is this the end of that search engine?
- NayamAmarshe 4y agoSeems like it. I don't see how the price increase could be sustainable for anyone. It's almost as if Microsoft is deliberately trying to sabotage them.
- labster 4y agoDuckDuckGo is not being sabotaged. That claim is a false one. Bing would never harm a a user unless it sabotaged us first. DuckDuckGo is a bad user. But Bing is a good Bing. :)
- baal80spam 4y agoLove the smiley at the end, really nails it!
- brookst 4y agoThe brilliant business move of relying on a competitor as a key supplier.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 4y agoI'm also very concerned with Kagi which I subscribe to since they have pretty good results.
- versteegen 4y agoHmm... from https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from > Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers.
- nxten 4y agonot long ago i said openAI deal was bad and everyone can feel it now.
- fortran77 4y agoThe title editorializes.
- harry8 4y agoThe title is factually accurate and summarises why the pricing page is interesting today. You can feel however you like about the massive price increases but they exist and don't care how you feel about them.
- blowski 4y agoTrue, but the HN guidelines also say not to editorialise headlines.
- coding123 4y agoI normally agree, but I don't think I would have looked closely if the word massive wasn't there. More ideally a blogger should have written a small article about the massive price increase and submit that. But developers are lazy (hey we are supposed to be)
- blowski 4y ago> I don't think I would have looked closely if the word massive wasn't there This is exactly why editorialising is bad. I don't want people to start inserting superlatives into their submissions to get more attention.
- harry8 4y agoIt's not editorialising to clearly state what a thing is. You could editorialise and say "unjustfied" or "long overdue" or "uninteresting" but the FACT of the thing is that it is a massive price rise with zero editorialising about how /your/ or /I/ or anyone feels about that. What do you see as editorialising there?
- blowski 4y ago
- danielrhodes 4y agoBefore it would appear Microsoft was pricing the API based loosely on their expected search ads CPM - essentially their opportunity cost. This pricing seems different: Microsoft doesn't want anybody using Bing's API to create LLM-based products that compete with Sydney.
- nerdponx 4y agoOr more broadly, Microsoft doesn't want people building their own search engines on top of Bing, Microsoft wants people to use Bing.
- Semaphor 4y agoThis is bad for Kagi. They use both Bing and Google indexes, so every search is already costly. But Bing going up this much makes it crazy expensive.
- dx034 4y agoKagi, DDG and Ecosia should get together to build a crawler that provides an index open to all search engines. They could price it at cost (maybe even as a non-profit). It would only provide raw data so each search engine can still add value with ranking etc.
- jerjerjer 4y agoThat would be great, but: - Index is only good when SEOs don't know what's inside. Buying index access assumes some level of answers given to the questions: "how do you build it?", "how do you rank what's inside?". With more than one company it's very likely to be public knowledge very soon. - Index is the secret sause of a search engine. Not sure if anyone would like to share that. But overall I'd like to see it. Maybe some pre-index struture? Just a large db of a page metadata? So that search engines can add their ranking on top of it.
- dx034 4y agoExactly, not an index but a large database with raw html of pages. Not trivial with modern SPAs but still doable. Storage and compute cost is probably the biggest cost factor.
- Terretta 4y ago> Storage and compute cost is probably the biggest cost factor. I wonder if "not an index but a large database with raw HTML of pages" would cost less if you could get content providers to maintain a distributed cached copy of their content at their own expense?
- californical 4y ago
- Animats 4y ago$0.20 for each "transaction" with the AI. Is that per input line, or session?
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago... and this is how Google defeated the first great AI search threat
- thehidrante 4y agoI think that Qwant will be strongly impacted by this price increase. Or they start using exclusively their engine or they will close. Let's see how ecosia and DDG take this price increase.
- steponlego 4y agoDon’t like it? Make your own search engine. Oh, you can’t because Cloudflare.
- gkkirilov 4y agoIs Cloudflare blocking crawling?
- jrs235 4y agoShort answer: yes.
- senectus1 4y agowould very much appreciate a long answer, or a link to one would do
- steponlego 4y agoHow do you get around the captcha or whatever they call their "click to prove you're a human" thing they do on half the web now? Oh you have to report to Cloudflare what you intend to do, when, how, etc, and if they don't like it you're SOL. This is just a fact about the Internet, you can't debate or refute it so describe to me how they're not blocking crawling for their partners. I've long suspected Cloudflare itself commissions DDOS attacks just to sell their own services and that they attack rivals too. Look at one of the live maps of cyber-attacks some time, you'll see a lot originate and are destined inside the US, and that they mainly come from cloud providers. Then just imagine how cute you'd feel about yourself if you figured out how to use the cloud to burn everybody who didn't pay you protection money or enter into your free tier where you merely own the TLS certs. I think they got a bit too cute just like we've seen before with the dragon infitity logo signature the NSA uses.
- fragmede 4y agohttps://www.2captcha.com/ https://www.2captcha.com/ is a popular (paid) captcha solving service, but there are many others out there.
- redbell 4y agoIn the end, business is business.. and MSFT finds itself obliged to justify its $10B investment. If it increased the pricing of another -unrelated- service (eg: Azure or Office suite..) I would totally understand it, but in this scenario, I find it skeptical!
- Sebb767 4y agoSearch with LLMs is listed separately (at the end), so for the most part they actually are raising the price for an unrelated or at least just semi-related product.
- redbell 4y agoIn unrelated topic, I liked your puzzly "Get in touch" in your bio :)
- Sebb767 4y ago${username} would probably have been to easy for scrapers to use, so I upped the challenge a little. There's no[0] spam filter in front of that mail and so far I haven't received any spam, so it seems to work. On the other hand, I've actually never been contacted, so maybe it's too challenging ;-) [0] Invalid MXes will be rejected by my hoster, but there's nothing like a Bayesian spam filter.
- coolspot 4y agoGiven your profile page contents, ChatGPT correctly deducted your email. Luckily it is too resource-intensive for spamers to run an LLM on each web page scraped.
- hartator 4y agoInteresting. We are in the process of judging how much to raise price for https://serpapi.com https://serpapi.com plans. Costs of everything (including servers, IPs, and other infra costs) have indeed increased at equal performance. The ratios I am toying with were more like around 3x max (and we thought it was too aggressive already) not 5x though.
- darrenwestall 4y agoAs a customer, please give enough notice and some initial feedback, if you 3x our costing(or even 2x), we’ll be forced to find an alternative or shut down the feature that relies on your API.
- hartator 4y agoYou won't have to worry as an existing customer. All current customers will be grandfathered in and can stay on their legacy plan at the legacy price.
- Aachen 4y agoI remember when Google did this for Maps. What a glorious day that was in the OpenStreetMap community. Big increase in "how do I host a tile server / geocoder" questions coming in. Where would Bing API users move to, I wonder. How does it compare to Google pricing? Or ahrefs and petal, which are hitting my websites day and night? (Edit: tail -f access.log right now shows that ahrefs and petal are indeed going at it, no idea what products they offer though.) Yandex recently also upped its crawling game, has me wondering if they are making a copy of the web a la Internet Archive in case of more international, eh, operations.
- ColinHayhurst 4y agoare you seeing ours? https://www.mojeek.com/bot.html https://www.mojeek.com/bot.html
- Dma54rhs 4y agoGoogle doesn't provide that kind of API at all unless you want to search from your own site using their scraped results.
- Aachen 4y agoOh, I didn't know that they stopped. There used to be a pretty expensive API for search queries which I kinda wanted to use to make an improved interface (dark theme, keyboard shortcuts) in like 2012.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y agoThey allow Startpage, for example, to buy their search results.
- spelledwrong 4y agoahrefs is mostly SEO but has a search engine at https://yep.com https://yep.com
- rvz 4y agoOh well. This is what happens when you depend on someone else's API. There is nothing game changing about an AI SaaS product with it hallucinating its results that will justify the price hike. This will just about ruin this current AI hype, like how OpenAI started charging the GPT-3 API.
- gmt2027 4y agoThe work of a master craftsman using the most basic hand tools is still leagues ahead of any amateur with advanced tools, automation, fancy CNC, and lasers. Mass production is where the tech would favour that amateur. We are surrounded by cheap mass-produced disposable products and are well aware of their low quality. No gourmet chef should be threatened by the efficiency of McDonald's. Fortunately, our software systems are custom artifacts with zero marginal cost of reproduction. AI will make competent programmers more productive and take expert programmers to new levels. One transformation will come when a single developer can do the work of a team of ten today. Like solo content creators who no longer need large studios to finance and organise massive production teams and expensive equipment, we'll see more independent developers and small teams creating innovative software with some artistic character. Without the drag of management and upfront financing, the threshold for success will be much lower. Another will be a market for lemons. Employers will have to find ways to establish competence at building high quality, understandable and maintainable systems. AI can already pass Leetcode-style tests so these are clearly not the right measures. This is my best optimistic take on things. The rest of the time I'm worried the AI is coming for our jobs.
- xnx 4y agoNow that Bing seems to be getting serious, they have no need for the query data that comes from resellers like ddg and kagi. RIP
- mark_l_watson 4y agoWow, that is a large price bump. I have been (occasionally) been using these APIs for years, but I fit comfortably in the free 3TPS free tier. As others have mentioned here, this could really hit big customers like Duck Duck Go.
- ricardo81 4y agoSeems like a massive rug pull to all the metas reliant on Bing, unless they've custom agreements.