SpyFu API Pricing: $0.20 to $5 per 1,000 Rows

SpyFu API pricing is pay as you go: every endpoint has its own rate, from $0.20 to $5.00 per 1,000 rows of data returned. You cannot buy the API on its own. Access comes with the Pro + AI plan ($119 a month, or $89 billed annually), which includes a $40 monthly API credit, and the Team / Agency plan ($249, or $187 annually), which includes $100. The $39 Basic plan has no API access. Verified on spyfu.com and developer.spyfu.com on 16 September 2026.

That makes SpyFu the rare vendor in competitor ad data whose API can be priced before you talk to anyone. The catch is that the rate is per row, not per request, and one careless request can return 10,000 rows. Below is the full rate card by endpoint, three worked monthly budgets, the billing mechanics that decide your invoice, and a plain look at what the ad data actually contains.

How much does the SpyFu API cost?

Two line items, and you pay both: the subscription that switches the API on, and the metered usage on top of it, less your monthly credit.

So the practical floor for a SpyFu API project is $89 a month on an annual commitment, and your first $40 of row charges each month cost nothing extra. Beyond the credit, usage is charged to the card on file. Pro + AI includes one user, with extra seats at $30 each; Team / Agency includes five. If you want the non-API differences between the plans (row caps, tracked keywords, reports), our SpyFu pricing breakdown covers them tier by tier.

What does each SpyFu API endpoint cost per 1,000 rows?

SpyFu publishes a CPM, a cost per thousand rows, for every endpoint. These are the groups, with the ranges inside each:

For competitor advertising research the three that matter are PPC Research at $2.00, Ad History at $3.00 and Competitors at $0.20. Notice the pattern: the paid search data costs four to six times the organic keyword rows. If you have read a summary quoting a single flat SpyFu API rate of $0.50 per 1,000 rows, that is the price of the organic keyword and domain stats endpoints, not the advertising ones.

How is the SpyFu API billed?

Monthly, on the calendar month in UTC. SpyFu's documentation states the formula: successful rows returned by each endpoint, divided by 1,000, multiplied by that endpoint's CPM. The endpoint totals are added together, the plan's API credit is subtracted, and the remaining balance goes to the payment method on file.

Three details change what you actually pay:

• You pay per row, not per call. Many endpoints return multiple rows by default. A request for one domain's ad history can come back with thousands of lines, and every one is billed.
• The page size is yours to set, up to 10,000. On the Domain Ad History endpoint the default is 5 rows and the maximum is 10,000. One request at the maximum costs $30 at the $3.00 rate. The same request against the top pages endpoint, at $5.00, costs $50.
• We found no documented spending cap. Usage above the credit is simply charged. SpyFu does expose monthly and daily usage through its Account API and on the API Usage tab of your account, so put a usage check into the job itself rather than trusting a loop to behave.

Rate limits are set per endpoint over a rolling one second window. The Ad History and SEO Research groups allow 10 requests a second, the Competitors API allows 1,000, and going over returns a 429 with a one second retry. Authentication is HTTP Basic: your SpyFu API ID and secret key, Base64 encoded, both shown on the API Usage page of your account.

What will a real SpyFu API project cost each month?

Three scenarios, priced from the published rates. Your row counts will differ, but the method is the point: estimate rows per endpoint, multiply, subtract the credit.

Two things jump out. First, for a small job the credit does most of the work, and the annual Pro + AI rate brings the first scenario down to $159.40. Second, the paid keyword pull, not the ad copy, dominates the bill at scale. If you only need to know what a competitor's ads say, cut the keyword rows and the agency scenario drops from $1,253 to $453. The single biggest lever on a SpyFu API invoice is asking for fewer keyword rows.

Does SpyFu have a free API or a free trial?

No free API tier is offered, and the Basic plan does not include access at all. SpyFu does not run a conventional free trial either. What it offers instead is a 30-day money-back guarantee on subscriptions, with no forms, which in practice works as a paid trial: subscribe to Pro + AI, test your pipeline against the $40 credit, and cancel inside 30 days if the data does not fit.

Use that month well. Pull a small sample for a competitor whose campaigns you already know, and check the rows against reality before you build anything on top of them.

What ad data does the SpyFu API actually return?

The Domain Ad History endpoint returns, per row: the ad headline, the description text, the landing page URL, the keywords that triggered it, its position on the results page, the date SpyFu captured it, and an ad ID. SpyFu's documentation describes the archive as 18 years of Google ad history back to 2007, and it covers 28 Google country markets, US by default.

That is a genuinely useful history of Google text ad copy. It is also the whole shape of it. There is no Display banner, no YouTube video, no Shopping image, and no Meta or TikTok data. And the keyword and position data is modelled, like every vendor's: nobody reads a competitor's Google Ads account, so the keyword list is inferred from scraped search results, brand campaigns are undercounted, narrow geo targeting is close to invisible, and Performance Max barely shows up because it does not run on a keyword list. We set out the observed versus modelled split in detail on our PPC competitor analysis page.

SpyFu API vs Semrush API pricing

These two get compared most often, and the difference is less about price than about whether you can see the price at all.

You can budget a SpyFu project on a whiteboard. You cannot budget a Semrush one without an account or a sales call, which our Semrush API pricing breakdown works through report by report. Similarweb is the same story with a different meter, data credits per data point, set out in our Similarweb API pricing guide. For a Google-only ad copy pipeline under a few thousand dollars a month, SpyFu is the cheaper and more predictable buy. For a broader tool comparison beyond the APIs, see SpyFu vs Semrush for PPC competitor research.

Whichever you choose, rows landing in a warehouse on a schedule are the part that breaks quietly. A month where the job returned zero rows looks exactly like a month where competitors went dark, so put freshness and volume checks on those tables before anyone builds a report on them.

Is the SpyFu API worth it?

Yes, if you need years of Google text ad copy and paid keyword estimates inside your own systems, you can estimate your row volume, and you want a vendor that prints its rates. The $40 credit on Pro + AI covers a surprising amount of light usage, and the published CPMs mean no invoice surprises you did not code yourself.

It is the wrong buy if what you actually need is the creative competitors are running today. Text ad history cannot show you a YouTube pre-roll, a Display banner or a Shopping image, and a keyword list cannot tell you which ad is working. For that half of the job, our Google ads library search reads Google's Ads Transparency Center, which publishes the live ads a brand runs across Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube, and puts them in one feed per competitor, tagged by angle and format and sorted by how long each has been running. Run length is the honest performance signal: an ad a competitor has kept live for three months is paying for itself. Plans are $39, $99 and $299 a month, and a one-time demo of ten searches lets you check a competitor before you pay. If a programmatic pipeline is the real requirement, the ad library API page lays out every official and third-party route for ad data in code, and Google Ads Auction Insights is the free way to confirm which competitors are worth pulling at all.