Lune

Comparisons

Lune vs Ceramic

Ceramic indexes 40 billion web pages and sells search to LLMs at $0.05 per thousand queries. Lune indexes a few orders of magnitude less and reads all of it. Cost per query is the wrong axis to compare them on.

Install the connectorSee pricingceramic.ai

Start with the one you should not buy from us

If the first list is you, take Ceramic.

Choose Ceramic if

  • You are running millions of queries and cost per query is the constraint.
  • Your agent needs current web information, not published research.
  • You want to index private company data behind the same search API.

Choose Lune if

  • A wrong citation costs more than a query ever will.
  • You need the paragraph inside the paper, not the page about it.
  • You want tools that check a claim, not just return results.

From a question to a citation

Ceramic

  1. Query 40B pages
  2. Rank results
  3. Context for the model

Lune

  1. Query top-tier venues
  2. Read the full text
  3. Quote with a locator
Cheap and broad, or narrow and read all the way through.

Line by line

Marks the side we think wins. We mark the ones we lose.

  • What is indexed

    Lune

    Peer-reviewed papers from top-tier venues, in full text.

    Ceramic

    40B+ web pages, plus your own private data.

  • Unit of pricing

    Lune

    A daily request allowance per researcher, from free.

    Ceramic

    $0.05 per 1,000 queries.

  • Who filters quality

    Lune

    Lune wins this row. Peer review, before anything is indexed.

    Ceramic

    Ranking, at query time.

  • What comes back

    Lune

    Lune wins this row. Quotes, locators, citation edges, typed tables.

    Ceramic

    Ranked pages for the model to read.

  • How you connect

    Lune

    Lune wins this row. An MCP server and a CLI.

    Ceramic

    A REST search API. No MCP listed.

  • Your own documents

    Lune

    A Workspace miniapp indexes uploads for your team.

    Ceramic

    Private data indexing behind the same API.

Where the difference comes from

Cost per query is the wrong number

Ceramic's pitch is a good one for high-volume products: web search at a hundredth of what the incumbents charge. If your agent fires a million queries a month, that difference is the whole business case.

It stops mattering the moment a query result becomes a citation. One reference to a paper that does not say what you claimed costs a reviewer's trust, and no query price makes that back. Different jobs, priced on different things.

Pages against papers

Web retrieval hands the model pages and lets it work out what is trustworthy. For general questions that is fine, because the web is where the answer lives.

For a scientific claim, the page about the paper is a lossy copy of the paper. Lune parses accepted papers at ingest and keeps the structure, so an agent can pull the ablation table or the stated limitation rather than a summary of it.

What your agent can call

  • search_papers
  • search_papers_many
  • search_related_papers
  • get_paper_fulltext
  • get_paper_citations
  • extract_from_papers
  • verify_claims
  • gather_evidence
  • list_conferences
  • get_conference_papers
  • search_research_guidance
  • get_research_guidance_doc

One connection, in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, ChatGPT or anything else that speaks MCP. The same tools back the miniapps in the Lune dashboard.

Price

Lune

Free
$0 10 requests a day, every tool
Pro
$4.99 a month or $47.90 a year, 300 requests a day
Max
$9.99 a month or $95.90 a year, 600 requests a day
Credits
$0.99 300 extra requests, no expiry

Ceramic

Web search
$0.05 per 1,000 queries
Private indexing
Contact internal knowledge

Ceramic positions that rate against $14.00 per 1,000 elsewhere. Prices move; treat this as a snapshot, not a quote.

What we read

Questions

Is Lune a Ceramic alternative?
Only if your agent's questions are scientific. Ceramic is web search infrastructure; Lune is literature infrastructure.
Is Ceramic cheaper?
Per query, yes, by a lot. It is also answering a different question, over a corpus nobody peer reviewed.
Can I use both?
Yes. Most research agents want the web for context and peer-reviewed text for anything they will cite.

Trustworthy AI for Scientific Research

Free to start. Every tool from the first request.

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