You.com
Web-grounded research and search APIs for developers and enterprises
Overview
You.com began as a consumer AI search engine combining web search with a chat assistant, citing sources for every answer. As of a February 26, 2026 relaunch, the company has pivoted primarily to a B2B Research API business: effort-tiered retrieval/research endpoints (Lite, Standard, Deep, Exhaustive, Frontier) aimed at developers and enterprises building on top of web-grounded search, rather than a consumer chat product. New API signups get a one-time $100 free credit.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 11 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- $100 usage credit on signup
- Works across all You.com APIs
- No model training on your data
- Clean Markdown or raw HTML output
- Page summaries and metadata
- Up to 100 results per call
- News Search API included
- Snippets with rich metadata
- Lite $12 / Standard $50 / Deep $100 per 1k
- Exhaustive $450 per 1k calls
- Frontier tier via sales ($2,000+)
- Deep and Exhaustive effort tiers
- Covers filings, macro data, derived calcs
Use cases
What you can produce with You.com
- Produce a polished multi-source research PDF report on a market, competitor, or topic using ARI — pulling from 400+ web sources simultaneously in under five minutes, with full citation traceability to original sources.
- Get cited, real-time AI answers to search queries with source links, using your choice of GPT-4o, Claude, or Gemini from a single interface without switching tabs or accounts.
- Search and summarize live news and web content with the Smart or Research API integrated into your own app or chatbot — used by clients including DuckDuckGo and Harvey.
- Upload company documents alongside a web query so ARI Enterprise can synthesize internal data with public web and premium database sources (500+ simultaneously) into a unified intelligence report.
- Use the YouCode mode to generate, explain, and debug code with live search context, pulling documentation and Stack Overflow results into the coding assistant in real time.
- Build an AI-powered search tool or chatbot using You.com's pay-as-you-go Search API ($5 per 1,000 calls) with LLM-ready snippets and up to 100 results per call.
- Run financial due diligence or market intelligence workflows using the Finance Research API, which cross-references filings, macro data, and market sources in a single structured call at $110 per 1,000 Deep-tier queries.
ASEAN Perspective
You.com in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
You.com finished its long pivot in February 2026: the consumer answer engine is now the shop window for a B2B Research API business, with effort-tiered endpoints (lite through frontier, roughly $6.50 to $300 per thousand requests) and a one-time $100 credit for new signups. The company claims the top score on the DeepSearchQA benchmark and counts DuckDuckGo, Harvey and Windsurf among API customers — credible validation for a web-grounded retrieval layer. Judge it as developer infrastructure, not a Perplexity rival: the consumer subscription still exists but no longer gets the company's attention, and its weak Trustpilot record (around 2 stars) reflects that neglect. ASEAN developers get standard global API access with usage-based billing and English docs. A solid retrieval layer to build on; skip it as a daily chat assistant.
What people say
$6.50 per thousand requests at the lite tier, $300 at exhaustive — that pricing table tells you what You.com is now. Since the 26 February 2026 relaunch, developer sentiment centres on the Research API, which the company says leads the DeepSearchQA benchmark at 83.67% accuracy, and on the customers it can name: DuckDuckGo, Harvey, Windsurf. B2B users are broadly positive. The effort-tier model (lite, standard, deep, exhaustive, frontier) gets credit for letting teams dial cost against research depth rather than paying flat rates, and the one-time $100 signup credit makes a real trial cheap.
The consumer story is grimmer. Trustpilot sentiment sits near the bottom of the category — roughly 2 stars from a small review pool — with complaints about abrupt paywall friction, free quotas that drain fast, a cluttered mode-picker interface and slow support. Users who liked the multi-model bundling (GPT, Claude and Gemini under one subscription) and the ARI deep-research agent, which chews through 400+ web sources and turns out PDF reports in minutes, increasingly note the polish gap against Perplexity. Search depth in non-English languages draws repeated criticism, which matters for Southeast Asian users.
The split makes sense given the money: a $100M Series C at a $1.5B valuation in September 2025, then a company-wide reorientation toward enterprise. Coverage of the pivot describes a firm that survived ChatGPT by giving up on consumers, and the reviews mirror that — developers building on the APIs are happy, while subscribers to the chat product read like the leftover audience.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
Notable facts
- You.com was co-founded by Richard Socher, the former Chief Scientist at Salesforce and a top-cited NLP researcher with over 90,000 academic citations.
- The platform does not use third-party tracking cookies — a significant architectural choice that differentiates it from advertising-supported search engines.
- You.com was one of the first AI search engines to offer multiple AI modes for the same platform, allowing users to switch between creative, analytical, and technical AI capabilities.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including You.com's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with You.com unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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