You.com

Under the hood, You.com sells one thing in several shapes: a real-time web index exposed through APIs that your agents and LLMs can call. The pitch on you.com is to "search the web, extract clean content, and generate grounded answers." In practice that means you pick how much of the work you want done for you. The Web Search API hands back raw results and snippets so you do the reasoning. The Contents API pulls clean page content. The Answer, Research and Finance Research APIs sit higher up and return grounded output. They all run on the same index, so moving between them doesn't mean switching providers.

The mechanics are developer-first. There's a Python SDK (the homepage example is a few lines: import You, call search, loop over results.web for titles, URLs and snippets), and there's an MCP server that gives you live search inside an agent with no API key, no account and no credit card, capped at 100 Web Search queries a day. Paid usage is metered per call, and the Web Search endpoint is advertised at $5 per 1,000 calls. You.com also just folded "Knowledge" into Web Search, so the same endpoint now returns live stock prices, crypto, weather and prediction market data at that same rate. That's a smart move: fewer separate integrations for the kinds of queries chatbots get asked constantly.

The part worth flagging is that you.com is listed here under Chatbot & Assistants with a $15/mo starting price, but the pages we reviewed are almost entirely about the API product. If you came for a consumer chat assistant, the source material doesn't describe that experience in any detail. If you're building an agent and need a search layer that's cheap to try and doesn't lock you into seats or platform fees, this is one of the more approachable options out there, and the free MCP tier means you can test it in an afternoon.