Yelp used to give developers its Fusion API for free, with a daily quota and a logo requirement. In 2024 it converted every account to paid plans, and the product is now documented as the Yelp Places API. Developers who had built small apps on the free tier got invoices, and the switch made the tech press for how little notice came with it.
Two years on, the plan cards are simple and the bill is not. Each plan carries a different set of fields, review access starts on the middle plan, and a daily limit quietly sets the maximum you can buy without a sales call. The figures below come from Yelp's plan page and developer FAQ, read on October 6, 2026, with prices as Yelp lists them. Yelp's own pricing page refuses most automated readers, so open it in a browser before you sign.
The three Yelp Places API plans and what each includes
Every paid plan includes 30,000 calls a month. What changes between them is the data each call is allowed to return.
| Plan | Per month | Business attributes | Reviews | Photos |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base | 229 USD | 15, no website URL or price level | None | Profile photo only |
| Enhanced | 299 USD | 23, adds website, price, service area | 3 excerpts of about 160 characters | Up to 3 |
| Premium | 643 USD | 66, adds ambience, amenities, history, owner name | Up to 7 excerpts plus Review Highlights | Up to 12 |
A 30 day trial gives 5,000 calls, and Yelp's FAQ says in capitals that trial calls are strictly for evaluation and not for commercial deployment. There is no ongoing free tier. Premium also comes with early access to Yelp's AI API at 20 calls a day.
The detail most comparisons skip sits in the Base column. Base does not return a business's website URL. A sales team that wants Yelp as a lead source for restaurants, contractors or clinics almost always wants the website, so the realistic entry price for lead generation is Enhanced at 299 USD, not 229.
Yelp API cost per 1,000 calls on each plan
Dividing each fee by the 30,000 included calls gives the price of 1,000 calls when you use exactly your allowance. Beyond 30,000, Yelp bills in blocks of 1,000 calls at the listed extra rate.
| Plan | Inside the plan | Extra calls | At 150,000 calls a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base | 7.63 USD | 5.91 USD | 938.20 USD total, 6.25 per 1,000 |
| Enhanced | 9.97 USD | 6.57 USD | 1,087.40 USD total, 7.25 per 1,000 |
| Premium | 21.43 USD | 14.13 USD | 2,338.60 USD total, 15.59 per 1,000 |
Unlike most data APIs, Yelp charges less for extra calls than for the calls inside your plan. On Enhanced, call 30,001 costs 6.57 USD per 1,000 while the average inside the plan is 9.97. So the plan fee works like a minimum commitment, and your average cost per call falls the more you use, up to the ceiling in the next section.
For scale, one successful page on our plans costs 0.98 USD per 1,000 on Starter (49 USD for 50,000), 0.60 on Growth (149 USD for 250,000) and 0.33 on Scale (499 USD for 1,500,000), the same rate whether the page is Yelp, Google or a store. A Yelp search page lists about 10 businesses and a business page holds about 10 reviews, so the unit is not identical to a Yelp API call, and the budget table further down prices whole jobs instead.
The 5,000 calls a day limit is the real price ceiling
This is the number that shapes every larger project. Paid plans carry a daily limit of 5,000 calls, reset at midnight UTC, and anything above it that day gets an HTTP 429. Five thousand a day over a 30 day month is 150,000 calls, and 150,000 a month is exactly where Yelp's plan page tells you to fill in the enterprise form.
Two consequences follow. First, the self serve Yelp API never costs more than about 938, 1,087 or 2,339 USD a month, because you cannot use more. Second, you cannot burst. A backfill of 50,000 businesses takes ten days at full speed, not an afternoon, and a daily refresh of more than 5,000 locations does not fit at any price on the card. Raising the daily limit means a sales conversation and a custom contract.
What a Yelp review costs through the API
Reviews come from a separate endpoint, one call per business, and return excerpts rather than reviews. Enhanced gives 3 excerpts of roughly 160 characters, Premium up to 7. Yelp picks which ones, weighing recency, votes and quality, and its FAQ is explicit that you cannot choose them or request the full text.
Inside the plan that works out to about 3.32 USD per 1,000 excerpts on Enhanced (9.97 divided by 3) and about 3.06 on Premium if all 7 come back. Both numbers flatter the API, because an excerpt is the first sentence or two of a review, not the review. For sentiment analysis, complaint tagging or response tracking, the words that matter are usually after the cut.
On the public business page the full review is there, with rating, date and the owner's reply, about 10 per page. At 0.98 USD per 1,000 pages on Starter that is roughly 0.10 USD per 1,000 full reviews, and 0.03 on Scale. Our Yelp scraper API page shows the request and the fields it returns.
The license rules that cost more than the fee
Three lines in Yelp's developer FAQ matter more to a business buyer than the price.
A 24 hour cache. You may cache Yelp Places API content for 24 hours at most. Only the Yelp business ID may be stored indefinitely. A lead list, a review archive or a monthly rating trend all depend on keeping data longer than a day, so under the API terms you would have to call again for everything you want to keep showing.
No analysis. Yelp's FAQ answers the question "Can my organization commercially analyze the data I receive from its API credentials?" with "Analysis is not permitted for Yelp Places integrations", and points to a separate Insights product. A review dashboard, a market study or a competitor benchmark is analysis.
Display rules. Content shown to users has to follow Yelp's display requirements, including the Yelp logo, star images and a link back. That suits an app showing nearby restaurants. It does not suit an internal CRM or a client report.
None of this makes the API a bad product. It makes it a licensing product for apps that display Yelp to consumers, priced and ruled accordingly. Teams whose real need is data they can store and study are paying 229 to 643 USD a month for a license that forbids their use case.
Real monthly budgets on the Yelp API and on a scraping API
Four common jobs. The Yelp column uses the cheapest plan that returns the fields the job needs. Monthly billing on both sides.
| Job | Yelp Places API | Scraping API |
|---|---|---|
| Lead list of 20,000 businesses with website, refreshed monthly | 299 USD Enhanced, and the list may only be cached 24 hours | 49 USD, about 22,000 pages |
| 500 client locations, new reviews daily | 299 USD Enhanced, 3 excerpts per location | 49 USD, 15,000 pages, full text |
| 5,000 locations daily | 1,087.40 USD Enhanced, at the daily ceiling | 149 USD, 150,000 pages |
| 30,000 locations daily | Enterprise quote only | 499 USD, 900,000 pages |
The scraping column assumes you check page one of each business sorted by newest every day and only go deeper when there is something new, which is how reputation tools keep request counts sane. If the lead list feeds a phone campaign, the next cost is the calling itself; an AI cold calling agent can work a list of local businesses by city and category without a dialer team. For Google reviews the same arithmetic is on our Google Reviews API page, and most agencies track both platforms side by side.
Where the Yelp API is the right buy
Consumer apps that display Yelp. If your product shows nearby businesses with Yelp ratings to end users, the licensed API with Yelp attribution is the clean route, and the display rules are a feature, not a cost.
Matching and enrichment. Yelp's business match and phone search endpoints find the right Yelp listing from a name and address or a phone number. Building that matching from search pages is possible, but it is fiddly work the API does for you.
Rich attributes without parsing. Premium's 66 attributes, from noise level to outdoor seating to the year a business was founded, arrive already typed. And there is no blocking to manage, because the API is the front door. Yelp's site refuses plain HTTP clients outright; we measured a 403 with an empty body on October 6, 2026, which is why scraping it takes rotating residential proxies and full rendering.
Everywhere else, which means analytics, storage, full review text or more than 5,000 businesses a day, a flat rate scraping API costs less and fits the use. Our pricing series has the same breakdown for SerpApi and Rainforest API, and every plan of ours is on the pricing page.
Questions buyers ask
How much does the Yelp API cost per month? Base is 229 USD, Enhanced 299 USD and Premium 643 USD a month, each including 30,000 calls. Extra calls cost 5.91, 6.57 or 14.13 USD per 1,000 depending on the plan. Above 150,000 calls a month, Yelp prices by quote through its sales team.
Is the Yelp API still free? No. Yelp ended free access in 2024. New accounts get a 30 day trial with 5,000 calls that Yelp limits to evaluation, not commercial use. Every production integration needs a paid plan.
Does the Yelp API return full reviews? No plan does. Enhanced returns 3 excerpts of about 160 characters per business and Premium up to 7, selected by Yelp. Full review text is only on the public Yelp page, which is why review analytics teams collect it with a Yelp scraper instead.
How many calls can I make to the Yelp API per day? Paid plans allow up to 5,000 calls a day, reset at midnight UTC, and return HTTP 429 above it. Raising the limit needs a conversation with Yelp's sales team, so plan larger backfills over several days.
Can I store data from the Yelp API? For 24 hours at most. The Yelp business ID is the one value you may keep indefinitely. Yelp also does not permit analysis of Places API data, and sells a separate Insights product for analytics use.
What is the cheapest way to get Yelp business data? For a handful of listings inside a consumer app, the Yelp trial and then Base. For lead lists, review monitoring or market research you need to keep, a scraping API, where 50,000 pages cost 49 USD a month and no license limits what you do with your records.