A Brave Search API alternative built on independent infrastructure

If you're evaluating web search APIs, you've probably looked at the Brave Search API — an excellent product at $5 per 1,000 requests. Kelly Search was built as an independent, privacy-first alternative with a Brave-compatible response schema, a generous free tier, and a different approach to ranking.

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Drop-in compatible with the Brave Search API

Kelly Search uses the same request and response shape as Brave's web search endpoint. If your application already queries Brave, migrating is a two-line change:

# Before (Brave)
curl -H "X-Subscription-Token: $BRAVE_KEY" \
  "https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/search?q=hello+world"

# After (Kelly Search)
curl -H "X-Subscription-Token: $KELLY_KEY" \
  "https://kelly-search.com/res/v1/web/search?q=hello+world"

Same endpoint path, same auth header, same JSON fields (web.results[] with title, url, description, meta_url, profile). Your parsing code stays untouched.

How Kelly Search is different

Independent infrastructure. Operated on our own servers — not a reseller of another company's index. Results come from a federated network of independent search peers plus our own continuously growing local index.
Spam-filtered ranking. Every result passes domain blacklists, keyword heuristics, language matching and quality scoring before it reaches your app. Trusted-source ranking for German-language news is a particular strength.
Built-in response caching. Repeated queries are served in milliseconds from our local result store.
Privacy-first, truly. No user tracking, no profiling, minimal logging. We store queries and results — nothing about the people asking.
Free tier that's actually free. No credit card, no time limit. Create an account, confirm your e-mail, and your API key works instantly.

Honest comparison

	Kelly Search	Brave Search API
Response schema	Brave-compatible	—
Index	Federated peers + own crawl (growing)	30+ billion pages, own index
Free tier	Free beta, no credit card	$5 free credits/month (~1,000 queries)
Paid pricing	TBA (below typical market rates)	$5 / 1,000 queries
Rate limit	Per-key limits during beta	50 req/s
German news quality	Trusted-source ranking	Standard ranking

Where Brave is ahead today: raw index size, freshness at global scale, and specialized endpoints (images, news, spell). If you need massive coverage for production workloads today, Brave is the safer choice. If you want a free, privacy-first, drop-in-compatible alternative — especially for German-language and news-focused use cases — Kelly Search is worth a try.

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