You.com
A research assistant that queries several AI models at once and returns an answer with a visible list of the sources it used.
What you'd use it for
Getting a web-sourced answer with the citations to check it, or wiring that same search-and-cite step into your own product through the API.
- Ask a question and get an answer built from several AI models, with a source list you can click through
- Pull live web search results into your own app via API, with page age and favicon metadata attached
- Run a Research query that scans multiple sources and comes back with a synthesised report, at tiers from Lite to Frontier
- Extract clean, LLM-ready text from any URL through the Contents endpoint
- Pull market and company data through the Finance Research endpoint
The verdict
You.com's actual product today is a search-and-citation API for developers and enterprises, not the consumer research chat it started as. The free tier gets you a working web-search call in minutes with no credit card, and everything past that is priced per call rather than per seat. The citation idea behind the product is still sound, but if you came looking for a browser tab to ask questions in, you will land on API pricing instead — it suits builders wiring search or research into their own tool far better than someone who just wants to chat.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free (Web Search API) | $0 — 100 queries/day, plus $100 free credit across all APIs to start | Developers evaluating the Web Search API before committing spend. | 100 queries/day, web and news results, LLM-ready snippets with metadata. |
| API pay-as-you-go | Web Search $5.00/1k calls; Contents $1.00/1k pages; Answer $5.00/1k calls; Research (Lite tier) from $12.00/1k calls; Finance Research (Deep/Exhaustive) $110.00/1k calls | Developers building search or research into their own product. | Web Search, Contents, Answer, Research (Lite/Standard/Deep/Exhaustive/Frontier tiers), and Finance Research API endpoints with country, language and freshness filters. |
Read from You.com's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
What you need to start
- An account at you.com/platform
- An API key from the platform dashboard for any programmatic use
A few minutes to an account and a free API key; the published example call returns a result in under a second once you have it.
Your first run Sign up at you.com/platform for a free API key, no credit card needed, and you can fire a working web-search call within minutes — the documented example returns results in under a second.
Where it breaks
The public pricing page shows only developer API pricing. No consumer subscription tier, price or plan name could be found — if one still exists for the chat product, it is not on the pricing page a reader would land on.
Browser-based, with the product positioned primarily as an API and enterprise research tool rather than a consumer subscription chat app.
Recovered the free tier and the full API rate card (Web Search, Contents, Answer, Research, Finance Research) by reading the pricing page's plain-text content directly — it was readable all along, not JS-gated. Consumer chat subscription still not found on the public site.
When not to use it
Not for someone who wants a simple monthly chat subscription and nothing else: that plan, if it still exists, is not on the public pricing page, so you would be buying API credits to get a chat window. Also not for a team without anyone to wire up an endpoint, since the pricing page now speaks entirely in API calls and per-thousand-request rates.
You.com’s pitch has always been the citation: rather than one model’s single answer, it runs the query across multiple models and shows you where each claim came from, with a source list you can actually check. For research-heavy work — competitive scans, fact-checking a claim before it goes in a client deck — that visible sourcing is the entire value proposition over a plain chat assistant.
The product has drifted over the past couple of years toward developer and enterprise infrastructure rather than a consumer subscription you sign up for and use daily. The pricing page that used to list a Free/Pro/Team ladder for the chat product now shows only API pricing — Web Search, Contents, Answer and Research endpoints billed per thousand calls, aimed at teams building search into their own applications rather than a person opening a browser tab.
What that means for a business owner
If you are looking for a daily research assistant with citations, this is still worth trying, but go in expecting to find the consumer plan (if it still exists) somewhere other than the main pricing page — it was not discoverable there at the time of writing. If you are instead evaluating search-as-infrastructure for something you are building, the API pricing is real, published, and starts with $100 of free credit.
Comparable
For a citation-first assistant without the API-first framing, Perplexity covers the same ground with a clearer consumer pricing page.
Alternatives
Assistants & chatAppsPerplexity
A research assistant that answers questions from live web sources and shows the citation for every claim, so you can click through and check it yourself.
Assistants & chatAppsChatGPT
OpenAI's assistant in a browser tab, a desktop app and a phone app, where you ask questions, draft text, and hand it files or spreadsheets to work through.
Assistants & chatModelClaude
Anthropic's AI assistant, available in a browser tab and — the part that matters here — as a desktop app that can read the files on your own machine and reach the systems you connect to it.
Assistants & chatModelPoe
One subscription and one inbox for chatting with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and dozens of other AI models, so you stop paying for and switching between separate apps.
Get You.com
Buying the tool is not the hard part.
The ebook is about what to hand over, in what order, and how you find out when it goes wrong. One payment, no subscription.