Search API Pricing Compared 2026
Per-query pricing for search APIs used in AI agents and RAG pipelines - Brave, Tavily, Exa, SerpAPI, Serper, Perplexity Sonar, You.com, Jina Reader, Firecrawl, and more compared at 10k, 100k, and 1M queries.
James Kowalski
AI Benchmarks & Tools Analyst
James is a software engineer turned tech writer who spent six years building backend systems at a fintech startup in Chicago before pivoting to full-time analysis of AI tools and infrastructure. His engineering background means he doesn't just read the spec sheet - he runs the benchmarks, profiles the latency, and checks whether the marketing claims hold up under real workloads.
He studied Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he first got hooked on natural language processing during a senior research project on sentiment analysis. He later completed a certificate in data journalism from Northwestern's Medill School.
At Awesome Agents, James owns the leaderboards and tool comparison coverage. He maintains the site's benchmark tracking methodology and is the person who actually runs the numbers before publishing any ranking. He is also an open-source advocate and contributes to several projects in the LLM inference space.
Based in Chicago, IL.
Articles by James Kowalski
Speech-to-Text API Pricing Compared - 2026
Per-minute and per-1000-minute transcription API pricing across OpenAI Whisper, Deepgram Nova-3, AssemblyAI, Google Chirp 2, Azure, AWS Transcribe, Groq, ElevenLabs Scribe, and more.
Structured Output JSON Schema Leaderboard 2026
Rankings of LLMs and constrained decoding frameworks on JSON schema adherence benchmarks including JSONSchemaBench and BFCL v3, covering native APIs and open-source constraint engines.
Summarization LLM Leaderboard 2026: ROUGE and Faithfulness
Rankings of the top LLMs on summarization benchmarks - ROUGE-L, BERTScore, FActScore, and human preference across CNN/DailyMail, XSum, GovReport, QMSum, and BookSum as of April 2026.
SWE-Bench Coding Agent Leaderboard 2026: Claude vs GPT
Rankings of the best LLM-powered software engineering agents on SWE-Bench Verified, with pass rates, pricing, scaffold notes, and methodology - updated April 2026.
Text-to-Speech API Pricing Compared - 2026
Normalized per-1M-character and per-hour TTS pricing across ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Google, Azure, Amazon Polly, Play.ht, Cartesia, Deepgram Aura, WellSaid, and more.
Text-to-SQL LLM Leaderboard 2026: Spider and BIRD Ranked
Rankings of the best LLMs and agent pipelines on BIRD, Spider 2.0, CoSQL, and SParC text-to-SQL benchmarks, with execution accuracy scores and analysis.
Web Agent Benchmarks Leaderboard: Apr 2026
Rankings across WebArena, WebVoyager, BrowseComp, Mind2Web, WorkArena, and WebChoreArena - every verified score for browser-driving AI agents as of April 2026.
Best AI PDF Tools 2026: Consumer Chat vs Dev APIs
Tested rankings of AI PDF tools across two categories: consumer chat apps and developer extraction APIs, with verified pricing and benchmark data.
Hallucination Benchmarks Leaderboard: April 2026
Rankings of the top AI models on factuality and hallucination benchmarks: TruthfulQA, SimpleQA, FACTS Grounding, Vectara HHEM, HaluEval, HalluLens, and AA-Omniscience as of April 2026.
Best AI Customer Support Tools 2026: 12 Platforms
A data-driven comparison of 12 AI customer support platforms covering pricing models, resolution rates, channel coverage, and helpdesk integrations for 2026.
Video Generation Benchmarks Leaderboard 2026
Rankings of AI video generation models across VBench, VBench-2.0, and the Artificial Analysis Video Arena Elo system, covering text-to-video and image-to-video performance.
