Context.dev vs You.com: Which Should You Use in 2026?

The short version

Context.dev and You.com both now sell web search and URL-to-markdown extraction, but built from opposite starting points. You.com publishes a search-accuracy benchmark; Context.dev bundles scraping, search, and brand-data extraction under one $25-a-month credit pool with no published accuracy number for its newer search endpoint.

Context.dev added a web search endpoint in 2026, and You.com started charging for markdown-only page extraction the same year, so two companies that used to compete in different lanes now bill for exactly the same two jobs.

Context.dev is a scraping-and-brand-data API founded in 2025 by Yahia Bakour. You.com is a search infrastructure company Richard Socher, a former Salesforce chief scientist, started in 2020. Both now court the same buyer: a two-to-six-person team building an AI agent that needs live web content and doesn't want to run its own crawler. Price is not what should decide this. What should decide it is which vendor can prove its results are any good, and only one of them can.

The verdict: pick the search company for search, the bundle for everything else

Pick You.com if the agent's core job is open-web search or research and a wrong answer is expensive. It's the only one of the two that publishes an accuracy number for its search product. Pick Context.dev if search is a nice-to-have next to scraping and brand data, and you'd rather pay one vendor $25 a month than stitch together three. There is no honest answer that fits both jobs equally well. Say so plainly instead of hedging.

What each one actually charges

Context.dev's Developer tier costs $25 a month for 10,000 credits at 60 calls a minute, according to its pricing page. A standard page scrape costs 1 credit, which works out to $2.50 per 1,000 pages at that tier: pricier than You.com's flat rate. Climb to the Pro plan and the math flips. $149 for 200,000 credits comes to $0.75 per 1,000 pages, cheaper than the alternative.

You.com's Contents API charges a flat $1 per 1,000 pages, with no tiers to climb, as of the pricing update that took effect March 12, 2026. There's also a $100 signup credit on both platforms, so a team can run the real numbers before committing a card.

Context.dev's Scale tier pushes the crossover further: $499 a month for 1,000,000 credits works out to $0.50 per 1,000 pages, still above You.com's flat rate but close enough that the gap stops mattering at real volume. Go over any tier's credit allotment and Context.dev bills overage in 10,000-credit blocks: $15 on Developer, $9 on Pro, $7 on Scale, according to its pricing page. You.com doesn't publish an equivalent overage schedule; its API is metered per call with no monthly allotment to exceed in the first place.

The search endpoint nobody expected from a scraping company

Context.dev's documentation lists a /web/search endpoint that takes a query, not a URL, and returns ranked results with Google-style operators like site: and inurl:. It costs 1 credit per 10 results. At Developer-tier list price, a default 10-result query runs about $0.25. Ask for the full 100 results the endpoint allows and the same query costs roughly $2.50, five times more than a single You.com Search API call.

You.com's Search API bills a flat $5 per 1,000 calls regardless of how many results come back, with a default count of 10 per call. So for a small query, Context.dev is cheaper. For a large one, You.com wins outright. Neither company's documentation says what happens between those two extremes for a mid-sized batch job, and neither publishes a volume discount table for search specifically.

Search quality is where this stops being close

You.com can point to a number. Its Research API scored 83.67% accuracy and a 93.16% F1 score on DeepSearchQA, a 900-prompt benchmark from Google DeepMind that tests multi-step research across 17 fields, according to a February 2026 announcement from the company. That is the highest publicly reported score on that benchmark as of this writing.

Context.dev's search documentation does not name the index or engine behind /web/search. We found no published accuracy figure for it anywhere in the company's docs, blog, or homepage. That's not necessarily disqualifying: a feature bolted onto a scraping product this year is allowed to still be unproven.

But it means a team betting an agent's factual output on Context.dev's search is doing so on the vendor's word, not a benchmark. A neural search product like Exa at least stakes its whole pitch on ranking quality; Context.dev built its reputation on scraping and brand data, added search as a fourth or fifth feature, and its documentation reads that way.

The one job You.com can't do at all

Context.dev extracts brand data from a domain: logo files in SVG and PNG, hex color palettes, font families with weight variants, and a full design styleguide, all from a single lookup. A brand lookup costs 10 credits, ten times a scrape.

You.com's Contents API returns page text, markdown, and a favicon URL. That's the entire brand-adjacent output. If an onboarding flow needs a customer's logo and brand colors the moment they sign up, You.com has no endpoint for that job, full stop. This is the clearest case in either direction: for brand and design-token extraction, there is no real choice to make.

One API key versus a stack of them

Context.dev ships an installable MCP server, run with a single npx context.dev-mcp command, that exposes every endpoint (scraping, brand lookup, search) to Claude, Cursor, or VS Code agents without writing a REST client. You.com integrates with agent frameworks too, through LangChain retrievers and its own MCP listing, but as a single-purpose search connector rather than a bundle of five different data types behind one key.

For a team that wants an agent to call one tool and get scraping, search, and brand data back from a single credential, that's a real difference in setup time, not just a marketing line.

Where Context.dev wins

A three-person startup building a customer-onboarding agent that needs to scrape a signup domain, pull the company's logo and brand colors, and occasionally search the open web for a company's recent news, all from one credit pool instead of three separate vendor bills and three sets of API keys. That's the case Context.dev was built for, and its $25-a-month entry price beats assembling a scraper, a brand API, and a hand-rolled LangChain data loader from scratch.

Where You.com wins

An internal research agent whose output has to survive a fact-check: a due-diligence tool, a compliance summarizer, anything where a wrong citation is a real cost. You.com's benchmark and its citation-backed response format exist for exactly that job. A consumer-facing engine like Perplexity solves a related but different problem, answering a human directly rather than feeding structured results to an agent's next reasoning step, which is the gap You.com's API is built to fill.

You.com's customer list backs this up. OpenAI, Databricks, and Amazon all use its search infrastructure in production, according to the company, and it processes more than 1 billion API calls a month at a claimed 99.99% uptime. That scale doesn't prove Context.dev's search is worse. It proves You.com's has survived more scrutiny for longer, which is a different thing worth paying for when the cost of a wrong answer is high.

The turn: isn't this just apples to oranges?

The obvious objection is that this comparison is unfair on its face. Context.dev is fundamentally a scraper; You.com is fundamentally a search engine. Of course they don't line up cleanly.

That objection held through most of 2025. It stopped holding the day Context.dev started billing for /web/search and You.com started billing for markdown-only page fetches through its Contents API. Both vendors are now asking the same buyer to pay for the same two capabilities. Holding them to the same bar is fair, even though one side has clearly been at it longer.

Switching cost: lower than it looks

Both platforms are pay-as-you-go with no minimum spend, and both offer a no-card free tier, so there's no contract to break. The real cost of switching isn't data or lock-in. It's re-pointing whatever code calls the API: a scraping job, a search wrapper, a LangChain retriever. Budget an afternoon, not a migration project.

One number neither company will confirm: Context.dev's own marketing claims 5,000-plus customers on its homepage, while its Y Combinator company profile lists 400-plus. That gap never gets resolved on the record, and a buyer evaluating the vendor's stability should notice it rather than take either figure at face value.

Context.dev hasn't published a single accuracy number for the search feature it now charges for, and You.com still can't tell an agent the hex code of a company's brand blue. Whichever one closes its gap first takes away the other's last remaining reason to exist.

Frequently asked questions

Is Context.dev cheaper than You.com?

It depends on the job and the volume. For page extraction, You.com's Contents API charges a flat $1 per 1,000 pages, cheaper than Context.dev's $25-a-month Developer tier ($2.50 per 1,000 pages) but pricier than Context.dev's $149-a-month Pro tier ($0.75 per 1,000 pages). For search, Context.dev is cheaper on small result counts and more expensive once a query asks for dozens of results.

Does You.com offer brand or logo data like Context.dev?

No. You.com's Contents API returns page text, markdown, and a favicon URL, with no logo files, color palettes, or font extraction. Context.dev's brand-intelligence endpoints return SVG and PNG logos, hex color palettes, and font data from a single domain lookup, a job You.com's API does not attempt.

Which one has better search accuracy, Context.dev or You.com?

You.com is the only one of the two that publishes an accuracy number. Its Research API scored 83.67% accuracy on DeepSearchQA, a Google DeepMind benchmark, according to a February 2026 company announcement. Context.dev's newer web search endpoint has no published accuracy figure and its documentation does not name the underlying search index.

Can I use Context.dev and You.com together?

Yes, and it is a reasonable setup for a team that needs both jobs done well. Some teams use You.com's Search or Research API for open-web discovery where accuracy matters, then use Context.dev for brand-data enrichment and site-specific scraping the search vendor doesn't offer. Neither company blocks pairing with a competing API.

What does switching between Context.dev and You.com actually cost?

Less than it looks. Both are pay-as-you-go with no minimum spend and a no-card free tier, so there is no contract to unwind. The real cost is re-pointing whatever code calls the API, such as a scraping job or a search wrapper, which is typically an afternoon of engineering work rather than a data migration.

Covered in this guide

Context.dev: Context.dev scrapes pages to markdown, extracts brand assets, and crawls entire sites via one API. Free: 500 credits. Trusted by 5,000+ companies.
You.com: AI Search APIs & Infrastructure for Enterprise Teams
Exa: Neural search API for AI agents, serving 400,000+ developers at $7/1K requests, with a free tier of 1,000 searches/month.
LangChain: Observe, evaluate, and deploy reliable AI agents
Perplexity: Perplexity AI searches the live web and returns cited, source-backed answers, used by 45 million monthly users with plans starting free.

Sources

Still deciding?

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