# Lune vs You.com

You.com now sells search infrastructure: web search, contents, answer and research APIs, with an MCP server on top. Lune sells the same shape of thing over a corpus that stops at peer review.

Competitor site: https://you.com.

## Choose You.com if

- Your agent needs the live web, with SOC 2 and zero data retention on the contract.
- You want one vendor for search, extraction and grounded answers.
- Enterprise procurement matters more than a published price.

## Choose Lune if

- Your answers cite papers, and someone downstream will open the reference.
- You want the section of the paper, not a page that mentions it.
- You want a price on the page and a free tier you can start on today.

## From a question to a citation

You.com: Query the web -> Extract clean content -> Grounded answer.
Lune: Query top-tier venues -> Read the full text -> Quote with a locator.

Both are infrastructure. The argument is about what the agent reads.

## Line by line

| Dimension | Lune | You.com |
| --- | --- | --- |
| The corpus | Peer-reviewed papers from top-tier venues, in full text. | The open web. |
| How you connect | An MCP server and a CLI, with OAuth or a token. | REST APIs plus an MCP server and agent skills. |
| What comes back | Quotes, locators, citation edges, typed tables. | Clean page content and grounded answers. |
| Published pricing | Free, $4.99 and $9.99 a month, or $47.90 and $95.90 a year. | Not published. Request a demo or a free tier. |
| Compliance posture | Standard terms and a privacy policy. | SOC 2, zero data retention, enterprise agreements. |
| Methodology guidance | A corpus on peer review, ablations and venue choice. | Not offered. It is general infrastructure. |

## Two answers to the same question

You.com and Lune both concluded that the useful product for agents is retrieval infrastructure, not another chat window. That agreement is worth naming, because most of this category is still shipping chat.

The split is what the agent should read. For a commercial question the live web is the only right answer. For a claim that has to survive a paper or a grant review, it is the wrong one, because the web will happily hand back a blog post about the study instead of the study.

## Grounded is not the same as quoted

A grounded answer API returns prose with sources attached. That is a real improvement on an ungrounded model, and it is where most retrieval products stop.

Lune returns the evidence rather than the prose. verify_claims answers a claim with the sentence that supports it and where it sits, or reports nothing found. Your agent still writes the paragraph; it just cannot invent the support.

## 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
- You.com Free tier: Trial, listed, no figures published
- You.com Enterprise: Contact, demo request

You.com does not publish API rates on its site.

## Questions

### Is Lune a You.com alternative?

Only for scientific questions. You.com indexes the web; Lune indexes peer-reviewed papers. An agent doing research work usually wants both.

### Does You.com have an MCP server?

Yes, it lists an MCP server and agent skills alongside its REST APIs.

### Does Lune have a REST API?

The supported paths are the MCP server and the CLI. The service contract is documented but is not a public integration interface.

## What we read

- [you.com](https://you.com)