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

Hokai chart of what the same job costs on each, from the Context.dev and You.com pricing pages as read on 7 November 2026.

Context.dev and You.com started in different places, one as a brand-data API and the other as a search engine. By 7 November 2026 both sell the same three things to an AI agent: ranked web search, clean page text and a one-call answer. Only one still sells logos and brand colors, and only one publishes search accuracy numbers.

Context.dev began as Brand.dev and was renamed earlier this year, and its founder says the product grew from logos and fonts into scraping, search and answers for agents. You.com sells a web search API, a contents API, an answer API and five tiers of research. This guide is for a small team building an agent that needs live web content and does not want to run its own crawler. Price will not settle it. The job your agent does most will.

What changed since 13 August 2026

The August version of this guide called You.com the cheaper way to fetch pages and Context.dev the cheaper way to search small queries. Context.dev has since cut its prices and widened its product, so the money picture has moved.

Four other changes matter more than the prices. Context.dev now sells an Answers endpoint, page monitors, people and company lookups and a news search, which it launched on 20 October 2026. It also announced a $9M seed round led by General Catalyst. You.com added a free MCP route that needs no key and a new Inference Router product. The old guide said both platforms gave a $100 signup credit, and that is no longer true of either.

The lineup holds: You.com for research where accuracy is the product, Context.dev for one balance that covers everything else. What flipped is the price order. The lineup before and after is the same two products, and the reasons below are new.

Re-checked 9 November 2026 against You.com's pricing page: every You.com price in this guide still matches, and the Research lite tier is listed at under 2 seconds, faster than the under 10 seconds this guide gave before.

The verdict: You.com for research, Context.dev for everything around it

Pick You.com if your agent's core job is open-web research and you need a vendor that publishes accuracy figures and sells deeper research tiers when a question is hard. Pick Context.dev if search is one of several jobs, you also need page text, company data or brand assets, and you would rather draw all of it from one credit balance at a lower list price. There is no honest answer that fits both jobs equally well.

How each company bills

Context.dev sells monthly plans that grant a pool of credits, and every API call spends some of them. Its pricing page lists these plans.

Pro starts at 100,000 credits for $90, and the page also offers 500,000, 1 million and 2.5 million credit options whose prices we did not read. Startups and nonprofits can get 30% off an annual paid plan for 12 months. A standard scrape costs 1 credit, and the credit costs of the other calls decide the real price.

You.com has no plans for the API side. It is pay as you go with no minimums, no seats and no platform fee, according to its pricing page. These are the per-call prices.

• Web Search API: $5 per 1,000 calls, with a median latency near 0.4 seconds.
• Contents API: $1 per 1,000 pages, at 1 to 10 seconds a page.
• Answer API: $5 per 1,000 calls, at a median near 2.7 seconds.
• Research API: $12, $50, $100, $450 or $1,200 per 1,000 calls, from the lite tier up to frontier.

You.com also lists $110 and $500 per 1,000 calls for its finance-tuned research tiers. A team that wants the cheapest honest comparison should read the table in the next section rather than these list prices alone.

What the same job costs on each

The table prices two jobs at three volumes using list prices read on 7 November 2026. Context.dev's Pro figure comes from one 100,000-credit pool, so the page job and the search job cannot both draw on a single $90.

Context.dev charges 1 credit per 10 search results. At the Developer credit rate a ten-result search costs 0.2 cents, which is the $2 per 1,000 in the key numbers. The Pro rate cuts it to $0.90.

Page text is closer. A scrape costs 1 credit, which prices 1,000 pages at $2 on Developer and under $1 on Pro, against You.com's flat rate in the table. Small volumes favor You.com, and heavy volumes favor Context.dev if you can spend a Pro credit pool.

Search: both sell it, one proves it

Both services accept a natural-language query and return ranked results with page content on request. Context.dev's search takes Google-style operators such as site: and inurl:, returns up to 100 results and accepts an allowlist of up to 100 domains. You.com's search takes a count of 1 to 100, a freshness filter and an allowlist of up to 500 domains. On features the two are close.

• Context.dev Pro$0.90 Leader
• Context.dev Developer$2
• You.com$5
• Exa$7
• Tavily$8

Context.dev and You.com read from their pricing pages on 7 November 2026. Exa and Tavily come from Hokai's records, last read 26 September and 3 October 2026.

What separates them is evidence. You.com publishes accuracy results for its research product. It says its Frontier tier reached 86.61% on DeepSearchQA in July 2026, up from roughly 84% on the first version, and 89.95% on FinSearchComp. DeepSearchQA is a 900-prompt benchmark from Google DeepMind that covers multi-step research across 17 fields. These are You.com's own numbers, run by the vendor, and the vendor chose the benchmarks.

Context.dev's search reference and overview pages, read on the same day, do not name the index behind /web/search and publish no accuracy figure. That is not a disqualifier for a feature that sits next to a scraper. But a team betting an agent's factual output on it is trusting the vendor's word and its own testing, not a published score. The guide to context engineering explains why the retrieval layer deserves that testing before any agent logic gets tuned.

Answers and research: the new overlap

This is the biggest change since August. Context.dev's Answers endpoint takes a task, researches it with company lookups, web searches and page reads, and returns the JSON shape you ask for. It costs 10 or 100 credits a call, and the Developer plan includes 1,000 Answers in Fast mode while Pro includes 10,000.

You.com's Answer API does the same job at a median of about 2.7 seconds. Its list price is the same $5 per 1,000 calls as search, while a 10-credit Answers call on the Developer plan works out to $20 per 1,000 calls, four times as much. We could not tell from the docs what separates the 10-credit and 100-credit calls, so check that before you budget.

For harder questions You.com goes further. Its Research API plans, searches repeatedly and reads full pages before it answers, and the research_effort setting trades cost against depth. The lite tier costs $12 per 1,000 calls and answers simple factual lookups in a single pass in under 2 seconds, with no structured output, according to the pricing page read on 9 November 2026.

The standard tier takes 10 to 30 seconds. The frontier tier costs $1,200 per 1,000 calls and runs for around five minutes in background mode. Context.dev sells nothing at that depth.

It does sell two things You.com's pages do not list, which are page monitors that watch a site for changes and a news search over more than 200 million articles. Both are cheap add-ons for an agent that tracks competitors, because they draw from the same credit balance as everything else.

Page extraction

Both services turn URLs into clean text. Context.dev prices a scrape from 1 credit, JSON extraction costs 5 credits a page, and a crawl costs 1 credit per page. Its homepage claims a 99.96% scrape success rate with no configuration, which is a vendor figure we did not test. The pricing page also says JS rendering and proxies are included on every plan.

You.com sells a Contents API that returns Markdown or HTML for URLs you already have, and its pricing page says to use it when you know which pages you want. At $1 per 1,000 pages it is the simplest price in this guide. If page text is your only job, Firecrawl deserves a look as well. Hokai's record, last read 3 October 2026, shows 1 credit per page and a Standard plan at $83 a month for 100,000 credits billed yearly.

The job You.com does not sell: brand and company data

Context.dev retrieves brand data from a domain: logos, colors and fonts, and a full styleguide. A brand retrieval costs 10 credits and a styleguide costs 10 credits. It also enriches a person for 20 credits a match, searches companies from 2 credits a call and searches news from 1 credit a call.

You.com's pages that we read list no brand, people or company-lookup endpoint. If an onboarding flow must show a new customer's own logo and colors, You.com cannot do that job, and the choice is made for you. This remains the cleanest split between the two.

Data handling, security and compliance

Both vendors say they hold a SOC 2 attestation, and the two statements read differently. You.com's enterprise page says its infrastructure is SOC 2 certified and lists zero data retention, a ready data processing agreement and CCPA compliance. Context.dev's homepage lists SOC 2 Type 2 and points to a trust center, and its Enterprise plan includes an MSA, a DPA, single sign-on through SAML and a 99.9% uptime SLA.

Here is the gap that matters for a regulated buyer. You.com names zero data retention as an available option, and the Context.dev pages we read do not. Ask Context.dev directly before sending customer data through it. We did not open either vendor's audit report, so treat both SOC 2 lines as claims until you request the report.

One key, one balance, or a stack?

Context.dev ships an MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code and Gemini CLI, plus a command-line tool and an agent quickstart that a coding agent can follow to sign up and fetch a key. Its SDK call is short. This TypeScript example comes from its search documentation.

import ContextDev from "context.dev";
const client = new ContextDev({ apiKey: process.env.CONTEXT_DEV_API_KEY });
const search = await client.web.search({ query: "Stripe API authentication", numResults: 10 });
console.log(search.results);

You.com offers SDKs and an MCP connector too, and its free route is the easier first try. A hundred web searches a day work over MCP with no key, no account and no card, which is enough to put live search in front of an agent this afternoon. The guide to the best MCP servers covers how that kind of connector sits next to the rest of an agent's tools.

For a team that wants one credential for scraping, search, answers and brand data, the bundle saves setup time. For a team that already runs a LangChain pipeline, either vendor is a retriever swap rather than a rewrite.

Where Context.dev wins

A three-person startup building an onboarding agent that scrapes a signup domain, pulls the company's logo and colors, and searches for recent news benefits from a single balance. All of it runs from one $20 plan, against stitching together a scraper, a brand API and a search vendor with three keys and three invoices.

Volume helps too. At 100,000 ten-result searches a month the cost table shows $90 against $500, and page text lands within ten dollars of each other. The vendor's own customer quotes, from Zero, Upstash, Chatwoot and Similarweb, are marketing, but most of them describe a fast setup, and the pricing page carries them. Builders choosing a no-code agent platform will find the single-balance model easier to budget.

Where You.com wins

A research agent whose output must survive a fact-check wants You.com. Think of a due-diligence tool, a compliance summarizer or a financial analysis product. The deeper research tiers, the published benchmarks and the finance-tuned tiers exist for exactly that job. A consumer engine like Perplexity answers a person directly, while You.com feeds structured results into the next reasoning step of an agent.

You.com also wins on the cheap first try, with 100 free searches a day and no key. It wins on privacy-sensitive work, since it names zero data retention. And it wins when the search call returns up to 100 results for the same flat per-call price, which makes large result sets cheaper than Context.dev's 10 credits for 100 results. The roundup of agentic AI tools shows where this kind of research agent fits among the products that use it.

Who should pick which

The split is easier to see by buyer than by feature.

Context.dev's Answers endpoint returns the JSON shape you ask for, and You.com says its Research API accepts a schema for the same purpose on the tiers above lite, because its pricing page lists the lite tier as returning no structured output.

Other options worth a look

Three tools on Hokai cover part of this ground, and each was read from Hokai's own record rather than from the vendor this run.

• Exa ranks results by meaning. Per Hokai's record (26 September 2026), search is $7 per 1,000 requests for up to 10 results.
• Tavily is built for agents and bills in credits. Hokai's record (3 October 2026) shows 1,000 free credits a month and a basic search at 1 credit, which at pay-as-you-go rates is $8 per 1,000.
• Firecrawl is the scraping specialist, and its record (read 3 October 2026) shows a free plan of 1,000 credits and search at 2 credits per 10 results.

None of the three sells brand data. The wider directory of search and retrieval tools lists more, and Smart Match can narrow a shortlist from a plain description of your agent.

Isn't this apples to oranges?

The obvious objection is that a scraper and a search engine do not compete. That held through most of 2025. It stopped holding when Context.dev added search, answers and news, and You.com added page extraction and a one-call answer, because both now ask the same buyer to pay for the same three capabilities.

The fair reply is that the products still differ in depth. You.com goes deeper on research and Context.dev goes wider on data types. Holding them to the same bar on the overlapping jobs is fair, and it is what this guide does.

Sponsor spot open

What would change the verdict

Several things would move the answer, and each is checkable.

1. Context.dev publishes an accuracy result for search or Answers, which would remove You.com's main edge.
2. Context.dev states a zero data retention option, which would close the compliance gap.
3. You.com ships a brand or company-data endpoint, which would end Context.dev's exclusive job.
4. A third-party benchmark, not a vendor's own, ranks the two search products against each other.
5. Your agent's volume lands in the range where a Pro credit pool beats $5 per 1,000 calls.

Until one of those happens, the split in this guide stands. The guide to choosing a language model and the cost comparison of LLM APIs cover the model side of the same budget, because search spend is only part of what an agent costs to run. A team shipping agent-sent mail can also read the roundup of email APIs for agents, which prices another piece of agent infrastructure the same way.

Switching cost: lower than it looks

Both platforms are pay as you go or month to month, and both have a free start, so no contract has to be unwound. The real cost is re-pointing the code that calls the API, whether that is a scraping job, a search wrapper or a retriever. Budget an afternoon, not a migration project. A safe order of work looks like this:

1. List every call site that hits the old vendor and note which endpoint each one uses.
2. Map each call to its equivalent, such as search to search and scrape to contents, and keep the old call behind a flag.
3. Run the same fifty real queries through both vendors and compare the results by hand.
4. Run both in parallel for a week and watch error rates and latency on your own traffic.
5. Cut over, keep the old key alive for a month, then close the account.

Browse every provider in the AI tools directory or read more Hokai guides.

Frequently asked questions

Is Context.dev cheaper than You.com?

Mostly yes on list prices read on 7 November 2026. A ten-result search costs $2 per 1,000 on Context.dev Developer and $5 per 1,000 on You.com. Page text is $2 per 1,000 on Developer, $0.90 on Pro and a flat $1 on You.com, so small volumes favor You.com.

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

The You.com pages we read list no brand, logo or company-lookup endpoint. Context.dev sells brand retrieval and a styleguide at 10 credits each, people enrichment at 20 credits a match and news search from 1 credit. If a product must show a customer's own logo and colors, Context.dev is the only one of the two that does it.

Which one has the better search accuracy?

You.com is the only one that publishes results. It reports its Frontier research tier at 86.61% on DeepSearchQA in July 2026, a figure from the vendor. Context.dev publishes no accuracy number for its search or Answers endpoints, so test it on your own queries.

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

Yes. A common split sends research questions to You.com and uses Context.dev for brand data, scraping and monitors. Neither vendor locks you in, since both bill month to month or per call.

What does switching between them cost?

Less than it looks. Both have a free start and no contract to unwind, so the work is re-pointing the code that calls the API, such as a scraper, a search wrapper or a retriever. Plan an afternoon of engineering, not a 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: Search API that ranks the web by meaning for AI agents and retrieval pipelines, with Lite, Auto and Deep search modes, an asynchronous research Agent and an official MCP server. A free Starter plan with monthly credits needs no payment method.
• Firecrawl: Web data API for AI agents: search, scrape, crawl and interact, returning LLM-ready Markdown. Open source core with a free plan and an MCP server.
• LangChain: Observe, evaluate, and deploy reliable AI agents
• Tavily: Five-endpoint web access API for AI agents: search, extract, map, crawl and research, with a free plan and a keyless trial mode.

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