AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Seltz – The fastest, high quality, search API for AI agents
Hi HN, Antonio here. Founder of Seltz. Seltz is a web search API built for AI agents. We wrote the crawler, the index, and the retrieval models ourselves, in Rust, by a team that's spent years building web search at scale. In our tests, queries come back in under 200ms. Efficiency was the first design principle. Search sits on the critical path: agents can't generate their first tokens or kick off the next tool call until results come back. When you run tens or hundreds of queries in parallel, every millisecond of tail latency compounds. Most search APIs for agents are wrappers around Google…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 2 we have checked on their own sites, 2 of them free or with a free tier.
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Our most accurate Search API for AI agents.
Jul 2026 · docs.firecrawl.dev · its alternatives →
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/agent by Firecrawl ▲569While building mendable - we found that feeding LLMs well-structured markdown improved accuracy. We also found it surprisingly hard. We found some great tools online, but none reliably handled the entire process. We wanted an API that took a URL, crawled the pages in the URL, and gave us an easy-to-use, up-to-date markdown we could feed into our index. So, we released an open-source repo and an API that crawls and turns entire websites into a markdown with just a few lines of code The API handles: - Crawling without consistent sitemaps - Infra to handle running many crawling jobs - Proxying,…
Dec 2025 · firecrawl.dev · its alternatives →
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Meilisearch AI▲241Boost relevance and UX with fast hybrid and semantic search
2025 · meilisearch.com · its alternatives →
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moltbook▲580Pretty bizarre. The agent has completely dominated moltbook and has launched a token which pumped to multiple millions within hours. It makes sense that agents would have their own currency. But pretty wild, imo.
Feb 2026 · moltbook.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN. I'm Fabien, principal engineer, 25 years shipping production systems (Ruby, Swift, now Rust). I built Moltis because I wanted an AI assistant I could run myself, trust end to end, and make extensible in the Rust way using traits and the type system. It shares some ideas with OpenClaw (same memory approach, Pi-inspired self-extension) but is Rust-native from the ground up. The agent can create its own skills at runtime. Moltis is one Rust binary, 150k lines, ~60MB, web UI included. No Node, no Python, no runtime deps. Multi-provider LLM routing (OpenAI, local GGUF/MLX, Hugging…
Feb 2026 · moltis.org · its alternatives →
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Automate your SEO and start ranking
2024 · searchatlas.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! We (Stephan and Thomas) recently open-sourced Semble. We kept running into the same problem while using Claude Code on large codebases: when the agent can't find something directly, it falls back to grep, reading full files or launching subagents. This uses a lot of tokens, and often still misses the relevant code. There are existing tools for this, but they were either too slow to index on demand, needed API keys, or had poor retrieval quality. Semble is our solution for this. It combines static Model2Vec embeddings (using our latest static model: potion-code-16M) with BM25, fused…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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RankAI▲581Hey HN, we are building Rankai (https://www.rankai.ai), an AI agent that pushes SEO blogs and code fixes automatically to your site. My teammate previously scaled a product to 4M users via organic traffic and SEO. And we understood the importance of driving SEO traffic for small businesses. But after we talked to a lot of small businesses and startups, we realized that majority are not doing SEO at all. For them, learning and doing SEO weekly is too time-consuming, and no way they'd hire an agency for $4k+. So we tried to automate each step of SEO process in an agentic way using…
Apr 2026 · rankai.ai · its alternatives →
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stackoverflow.ai▲421AI-powered, conversational search and discovery tool
2025 · stackoverflow.com · its alternatives →
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Web Search Agents by Nimblefree tier, from $208.33/mo▲371Self-learning agents automate web research + retrieval
Aug 2026 · nimbleway.com · its alternatives →
- 11DR
I'd like to invite everyone to try out DontBeEvil.rip, an experimental search engine for developers. tl;dr $ alias rip="curl -G -H 'Accept: text/plain' --url https://dontbeevil.rip/search --data-urlencode " $ rip 'q=Heartbleed bug' DontBeEvil.rip is a year long experiment to see if a small team can build a developer-focused search engine that is self-sustaining on $10 monthly subscriptions. It works by only indexing high-quality resources that are relevant to developers. You won't get useless listicles because we'll never crawl them. Relevant urls are harvested from HN,…
2022 · its alternatives →
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The stack: two agents on separate boxes. The public one (nullclaw) is a 678 KB Zig binary using ~1 MB RAM, connected to an Ergo IRC server. Visitors talk to it via a gamja web client embedded in my site. The private one (ironclaw) handles email and scheduling, reachable only over Tailscale via Google's A2A protocol. Tiered inference: Haiku 4.5 for conversation (sub-second, cheap), Sonnet 4.6 for tool use (only when needed). Hard cap at $2/day. A2A passthrough: the private-side agent borrows the gateway's own inference pipeline, so there's one API key and one billing relationship…
Mar 2026 · georgelarson.me · its alternatives →
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Desearch▲113First Decentralized AI Search for Builders & Agents
2025 · desearch.ai · its alternatives →
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Exa 3.0free tier, from $4/mo▲188Smarter search that gives AI agent richer data at lower cost
4d ago · exa.ai · its alternatives →
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Tantivy▲68A full-text, horse-speed search engine library in Rust
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Moltcraft▲100Visualize your AI agents work in a pixel world
Feb 2026 · moltcraft.xyz · its alternatives →
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No one’s got money for another AI subscription. So we made our browser agent totally FREE. What's the catch? Just ads while Retriever AI fetches you leads, does your exams, applied to jobs, and sends connection requests. Think like a Claude Code or Clay level tool in your browser, but free for everyone! After 35K+ users and 7M+ workflows, we spent the last few months attacking the cost of every agent step: - switching to DeepSeek Flash - Code Mode to one shot complex workflows - optimizing for 80%+ token cache hits So that now just an ad impression covers the entire cost of the agent (LLM…
2025 · rtrvr.ai · its alternatives →
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Hello HN, I’m Kamil. The past months have been filled with news about ChatGPT, Bard, etc. Thankfully, there are some heroic attempts to bring that power to the users. I wanted to contribute to that effort with my side project, an extension for Chrome: it makes searching the history by meaning – instead of the exact words – possible. This is only a proof of concept, building on the excellent transformers.js[0], and running entirely in the browser. My goal here is to explore the possibilities unlocked by a client-side AI. I would love to have your feedback, to know which direction that project…
2023 · getpinbot.com · its alternatives →
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Trails▲81Hey all, Justin here. I previously built Phind, the AI search engine for developers. One of the biggest problems we had there was figuring out what went wrong with bad searches. We had tons of searches per day, but less than 1% of users gave any explicit feedback. So we were either manually digging through searches or making general system improvements and hoping they helped. This problem gets harder with agents. Traces are longer and more complex. It takes more effort to review them, so I'm building a tool that lets you analyze LLM outputs directly to help developers of LLM apps and agents…
Jan 2026 · trails-red.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 24FS
Hi! According to my benchmark tests I've just built the fastest free-text search engine in the world [0]. However, providing proof of that as well as making people care has proven to be a near impossible task. I could use some help from fellow programmers to both work on the formal proof but also to test this code against the Big5's offerings of full-text search. Would you care to go fetch an amount of common crawl data to test the abilities of ResinDB? If not, then do you perhaps have another strategy to convince people when you have invented something big? Is writing papers and formally…
2017 · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →