Microsoft’s Bing Search API prices rose on May 1, 2023, with reported increases ranging from about threefold to tenfold depending on the product and tier. Microsoft said the new model better reflected investments in Bing technology and search improvements; it did not say the increase was specifically intended to repay its OpenAI investment. The original APIs were later retired on August 11, 2025, so the old price list is now a historical record, not a current buying option.
What Microsoft changed in 2023
Microsoft announced a new pricing model for eight Bing Search APIs, effective May 1, 2023. The affected products were Bing Web Search, Image Search, Video Search, News Search, Visual Search, Entity Search, Autosuggest and Spell Check. The change was not one uniform increase: the amount depended on the API, tier and billing unit. Computerworld’s February 21, 2023 report described increases of roughly threefold to tenfold.
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These were Bing Search APIs, not Microsoft Advertising’s Bing Ads API. Nor does “price per transaction” always mean the same number of requests: the historical Image Search example below is priced per 25,000 transactions, while the Web Search examples use 1,000-transaction units.
Representative reported price changes
The following are historical figures reported by Computerworld around the 2023 announcement, not current Microsoft prices. They illustrate why “more than tripled” does not describe every tier precisely.
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| API and tier | Previous reported price | New reported price | Approximate change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bing Web Search S1 | $7 per 1,000 transactions | $25 per 1,000 transactions | 3.6× |
| Bing Web Search S2 | $3 per 1,000 transactions | $15 per 1,000 transactions | 5× |
| Bing Autosuggest S2 | $3 per 10,000 transactions | $15 per 10,000 transactions | 5× |
| Bing Image Search S1 | $7 per 25,000 transactions | $25 per 25,000 transactions | 3.6× |
| Other tiers and add-ons | Varied | Varied | Reported increases reached 10× |
Source for all examples and the reported range: Computerworld. The figures are not a complete historical rate card. Microsoft’s surfaced Azure pricing page contains legacy or unavailable fields and is not a clean archive of the 2023 change: Bing Entity Search pricing page.
Why tiers and throughput mattered
Historical Microsoft pricing documentation described S1 as supporting up to 250 transactions per second and bundling Web, Image, News, Video and Entity Search, with Autosuggest and Spell Check capabilities. It described S6 as a 100-TPS Web and Entity Search offering. These are historical plan characteristics, not currently purchasable options. A buyer therefore had to consider both the transaction rate and the bundle or throughput capacity, rather than multiplying a single headline price by total requests. Microsoft’s historical pricing documentation.
Why Microsoft said prices were rising
Microsoft’s stated rationale was that the pricing model should better reflect investment in Bing’s technology and improvements to the search experience. The explanation included work on the search index, Visual Search, Entity Search and AI integrations, as reported by Computerworld.
The timing made generative AI relevant context: Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI in January 2023 and was integrating generative-AI capabilities into Bing before the May price change took effect. But the public rationale does not establish that Microsoft set the API prices specifically to recover the cost of ChatGPT or a particular OpenAI expense. It is more accurate to describe the increase as part of a broader effort to charge for a more heavily invested, AI-enhanced search service.
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The increase mattered most to products making many search calls or relying on several Bing endpoints for one user action. Potentially exposed businesses included metasearch and content-discovery services, shopping and travel applications, enterprise knowledge tools, and products that make frequent image, news, video, autosuggest or spell-check requests.
A tier’s public list price was only one part of the bill. Actual exposure depended on request volume and API mix, throughput needs, caching, retries, contract terms, currency, region and taxes. High-volume customers with negotiated Azure agreements could pay differently from public list prices. Repeatedly calling multiple endpoints for one query could also increase costs beyond a simple estimate based on Web Search alone.
How to estimate the historical price impact
For a given endpoint and billing unit, a basic estimate is:
Estimated monthly API cost = (monthly billable transactions ÷ transactions per pricing unit) × price per pricing unit
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Calculate each endpoint separately, using its own transaction unit and tier. Then account for the factors that change the bill or the tier required:
- Monthly calls by endpoint, including how many calls each user action triggers.
- Peak transactions per second, not just the monthly average; a higher-throughput tier may not be necessary for low-volume use.
- Cache hit rate, while checking freshness, licensing and policy requirements before caching results.
- Retries and timeout behavior, which can create additional requests.
- Optional add-ons, multiple APIs and any different transaction units.
- Region, currency, taxes and the terms of an enterprise or other negotiated agreement.
This calculation can clarify how a historical increase would have affected an application, but the old rates should not be used as a current procurement estimate.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.The APIs were retired in 2025
Microsoft announced that the original Bing Search APIs would be retired on August 11, 2025. Its notice said existing instances would be decommissioned and new customer signups discontinued. Microsoft directed customers to Grounding with Bing Search through Azure AI Agents as a migration destination. See Microsoft’s retirement announcement.
Grounding with Bing Search is not automatically a drop-in substitute for a conventional ranked-results API. A migration needs to account for how the application consumes results, what the new workflow returns, and how billing and eligibility work. Microsoft’s retirement notice recommends the successor but does not provide a directly comparable per-1,000-search public price. Confirm current pricing and terms with Microsoft before budgeting.
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- Model endpoint-level costs. Bundles, transaction units and throughput tiers can make a blanket percentage increase misleading.
- Separate performance from price. A higher rate does not, by itself, prove that every customer received better performance or reliability.
- Limit switching costs. Keep provider-specific response handling behind an abstraction where practical, and test alternatives against the application’s actual needs.
- Monitor lifecycle notices. A price change is one kind of platform risk; retirement can eventually make the product unavailable altogether.
- Revalidate the whole contract. When migrating, check result structure, ranking, pagination, safe-search behavior, citation metadata, latency, licensing and cost rather than assuming two search products are equivalent.
The 2023 price increase was a significant change for developers who depended on the APIs, but it was only one stage of the story. Their 2025 retirement means the practical question for a current project is which supported search or grounding approach fits its requirements—not whether to start a new deployment at the old Bing Search API rates.
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