# 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.

Competitor site: https://ceramic.ai.

## 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: Query 40B pages -> Rank results -> Context for the model.
Lune: Query top-tier venues -> Read the full text -> Quote with a locator.

Cheap and broad, or narrow and read all the way through.

## Line by line

| Dimension | Lune | Ceramic |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What is indexed | Peer-reviewed papers from top-tier venues, in full text. | 40B+ web pages, plus your own private data. |
| Unit of pricing | A daily request allowance per researcher, from free. | $0.05 per 1,000 queries. |
| Who filters quality | Peer review, before anything is indexed. | Ranking, at query time. |
| What comes back | Quotes, locators, citation edges, typed tables. | Ranked pages for the model to read. |
| How you connect | An MCP server and a CLI. | A REST search API. No MCP listed. |
| Your own documents | A Workspace miniapp indexes uploads for your team. | Private data indexing behind the same API. |

## 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.

## Pricing

- Lune Free: $0, 10 requests a day, every tool
- Lune Pro: $4.99, a month or $47.90 a year, 300 requests a day
- Lune Max: $9.99, a month or $95.90 a year, 600 requests a day
- Lune Credits: $0.99, 300 extra requests, no expiry
- Ceramic Web search: $0.05, per 1,000 queries
- Ceramic Private indexing: Contact, internal knowledge

Ceramic positions that rate against $14.00 per 1,000 elsewhere.

## 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.

## What we read

- [ceramic.ai](https://ceramic.ai)