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Vespa
Vespa is an open-source AI search engine, big-data serving engine, and vector database originally developed inside Yahoo and spun out as Vespa.ai AS. Vespa combines vector search, text search (BM25), structured filtering, and machine-learned ranking — including native tensor inference — into a single distributed serving engine that scales to billions of documents with sub-100ms latency. Vespa Cloud is the fully managed commercial offering operated by the Vespa.ai team across AWS and GCP, with Startup, Basic, Commercial, and Enterprise plans plus a Self-Managed option for customers running the open-source engine on their own infrastructure. Vespa is widely used at Spotify, Perplexity, Yahoo, Farfetch, and Elicit for search, recommendation, personalization, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
Vespa publishes 2 APIs on the APIs.io network: Document API and Query API. Tagged areas include AI, Search, Vector Database, Big Data, and Machine Learning.
The Vespa catalog on APIs.io includes 1 JSON-LD context and 2 Spectral governance rulesets.
Vespa’s developer surface includes authentication, documentation, getting-started guide, engineering blog, pricing, developer console, support, and 27 more developer resources.
8 APIs
20 Features
6 Use Cases
AI Search Vector Database Big Data Machine Learning Semantic Search Retrieval Augmented Generation Open Source Tensor Recommendations
On this page
Kin Score
APIs 8
Postman 1
Open Collections 1
Pricing Plans 1
Rate Limits 1
FinOps 1
Features 20
Vocabularies 1
Spectral Rules 2
JSON Schema 2
JSON Structure 1
Examples 2
Security Posture 3
Agentic Access 1
Use Cases 6
Integrations 12
Resources 34
apis.yml
53 Operational Transparency
Composite quality — 60.4/100 · strong
Contract Quality
16.3 / 25
Developer Ergonomics
12.6 / 20
Commercial Clarity
10.0 / 20
Operational Transparency
6.8 / 13
Agent readiness — 31/100 · agent aware
Machine-Readable Contract
18 / 18
Agentic Access Contract
10 / 10
MCP Server
0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth
10 / 10
Idempotency
0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics
0 / 8
Request/Response Examples
0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling
7 / 7
Typed Event Surface
0 / 6
Agent Skills
0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog
0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity
0 / 3
A2A Agent Card
0 / 8
Dry-Run / Simulate Mode
0 / 4
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Scroll for all 8
Ready-to-run Postman collections for exercising this provider's APIs.
Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Notable capabilities this provider offers.
Open-source under Apache 2.0
Vector search with HNSW indexes
BM25 text search and hybrid search
Native tensor and ML model inference at serving time
YQL (Vespa Query Language) for structured queries
Multi-phase ranking (match-phase, first-phase, second-phase, global-phase)
Document API with conditional writes, visits, and JSON Lines streaming
Multi-tenant namespaces and document groups
Real-time indexing with sub-100ms query latency
Distributed content clusters with automatic sharding and replication
Streaming search mode for personal/private corpora
Built-in machine learning inference (TensorFlow, ONNX, XGBoost, LightGBM)
Approximate nearest neighbor and exact nearest neighbor operators
Application packages with schemas, services.xml, and rank profiles
Container API for custom searchers, document processors, and handlers
Self-managed (Apache 2.0) or fully managed Vespa Cloud (AWS, GCP)
Vespa Cloud Startup plan from $0.05 / vCPU-hour, $0.005 / GiB-memory-hour
Vespa Cloud Commercial plan with 24/7 1-hour SLA support
Vespa Cloud Enterprise plan with $20k/month minimum and 15-minute SLA
Up to 50% volume discounts and 15% committed-spend discount
Scroll for all 20
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Spectral governance rulesets for linting and validating these APIs.
Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.
JSON Structure definitions describing this provider's data shapes.
Example request and response payloads for these APIs.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
What developers build with this provider.
Pre-built integrations with other platforms and tools.
Scroll for all 12
Get Started 2
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Documentation 1
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Design & Contract 3
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 10
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Scroll for all 10
Access & Security 3
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Learn 1
Tutorials, courses, talks, and written guidance
Operate 4
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 4
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 3
The organization behind the API
Other 2
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
Source (apis.yml)
aid: vespa-ai
name: Vespa
description: Vespa is an open-source AI search engine, big-data serving engine, and vector database originally developed inside
Yahoo and spun out as Vespa.ai AS. Vespa combines vector search, text search (BM25), structured filtering, and machine-learned
ranking — including native tensor inference — into a single distributed serving engine that scales to billions of documents
with sub-100ms latency. Vespa Cloud is the fully managed commercial offering operated by the Vespa.ai team across AWS and
GCP, with Startup, Basic, Commercial, and Enterprise plans plus a Self-Managed option for customers running the open-source
engine on their own infrastructure. Vespa is widely used at Spotify, Perplexity, Yahoo, Farfetch, and Elicit for search,
recommendation, personalization, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
type: Index
accessModel:
pricing: freemium
onboarding: self-serve
trial: false
try_now: true
public: false
label: Freemium · Self-serve signup
confidence: high
source:
- plans
- authentication
generated: '2026-07-22'
method: derived
position: Provider
access: 3rd-Party
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/vespa-ai.png
tags:
- AI
- Search
- Vector Database
- Big Data
- Machine Learning
- Semantic Search
- Retrieval Augmented Generation
- Open Source
- Tensor
- Recommendations
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/vespa-ai/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
created: '2026-05-25'
modified: '2026-05-25'
specificationVersion: '0.19'
apis:
- aid: vespa-ai:vespa-document-api
name: Vespa Document API
description: The Vespa Document API (/document/v1) provides synchronous REST access to document operations against a Vespa
content cluster. It supports Put, Get, Update (partial update with assign/add/remove operators), Remove, and Visit (streaming
visit, copy, delete-where, update-where) over JSON or JSON Lines, with conditional writes, multi-tenant namespaces, field-set
projection, time-window selection, and pagination via continuation tokens.
humanURL: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/document-v1-api-reference.html
tags:
- Documents
- CRUD
- Indexing
- Data
- Streaming
properties:
- url: openapi/vespa-document-api-openapi.yml
type: OpenAPI
- url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/document-v1-api-reference.html
type: Documentation
- url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/writing/document-v1-api-guide.html
type: Documentation
- url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reads-and-writes.html
type: Documentation
- aid: vespa-ai:vespa-deploy-api
name: Vespa Deploy API
description: The Vespa Deploy API (/application/v2) manages application packages on a Vespa configuration server. It supports
preparing, activating, and tearing down application packages, session-based deployments, schema validation, and zero-downtime
updates of services, schemas, and rank profiles.
humanURL: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/deploy-rest-api-v2.html
tags:
- Deployment
- Configuration
- Application
- DevOps
properties:
- url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/deploy-rest-api-v2.html
type: Documentation
- url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/application-packages.html
type: Documentation
- aid: vespa-ai:vespa-tenant-api
name: Vespa Tenant and Application API
description: The Vespa Tenant API (/application/v2/tenant) manages tenants and applications hosted on a Vespa configuration
server or Vespa Cloud control plane. It exposes operations for creating tenants, listing applications, and binding application
sessions to a tenant.
humanURL: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/application-v2-tenant.html
tags:
- Tenants
- Applications
- Multi-Tenancy
- Administration
properties:
- url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/application-v2-tenant.html
type: Documentation
- aid: vespa-ai:vespa-config-api
name: Vespa Config API
description: The Vespa Config API (/config/v2) lets services in a Vespa application retrieve their configuration from a
Vespa configuration server using the config-server / config-proxy protocol. It is primarily used by Vespa services and
tooling rather than end users, but is documented as a stable HTTP API.
humanURL: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/config-rest-api-v2.html
tags:
- Configuration
- Internal
properties:
- url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/config-rest-api-v2.html
type: Documentation
- aid: vespa-ai:vespa-cluster-api
name: Vespa Cluster Controller API
description: The Vespa Cluster Controller API (/cluster/v2) exposes runtime state and management endpoints for a Vespa content
cluster — including node state queries, maintenance-mode transitions, and storage cluster orchestration.
humanURL: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/cluster-v2.html
tags:
- Cluster
- Operations
- Content
- State
properties:
- url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/cluster-v2.html
type: Documentation
- aid: vespa-ai:vespa-state-api
name: Vespa State API
description: The Vespa State API (/state/v1) exposes per-service health, version, and metrics endpoints for any Vespa node
— used by orchestration tooling, monitoring agents, and load balancers to check liveness, readiness, and runtime metrics.
humanURL: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/state-v1.html
tags:
- Health
- Monitoring
- Metrics
- Observability
properties:
- url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/state-v1.html
type: Documentation
- aid: vespa-ai:vespa-metrics-api
name: Vespa Metrics API
description: Vespa exposes a family of metrics endpoints (/metrics/v1, /metrics/v2, /prometheus/v1) that publish Vespa engine
and application metrics in JSON or Prometheus exposition format for scraping by Prometheus, Grafana, or other observability
stacks.
humanURL: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/operations/metrics.html
tags:
- Metrics
- Prometheus
- Observability
- Monitoring
properties:
- url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/operations/metrics.html
type: Documentation
- url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/metrics-v1.html
type: Documentation
- url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/metrics-v2.html
type: Documentation
- url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/prometheus-v1.html
type: Documentation
- aid: vespa-ai:vespa-ai-query-api
name: Vespa Query API
description: The Query API from Vespa — 1 operation(s) for query.
humanURL: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/query-api.html
tags:
- Query
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/vespa-ai-query-api-openapi.yml
- type: Documentation
url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/query-api.html
- type: Documentation
url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/reference/api/query.html
- type: GettingStarted
url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/getting-started.html
common:
- type: PostmanWorkspace
url: https://www.postman.com/kinlaneapi/vespa/overview
- type: AgenticAccess
url: agentic-access/vespa-ai-agentic-access.yml
- type: VulnerabilityDisclosure
url: security/vespa-ai-vulnerability-disclosure.yml
- type: DomainSecurity
url: security/vespa-ai-domain-security.yml
- type: Authentication
url: authentication/vespa-ai-authentication.yml
- type: Website
url: https://vespa.ai
- type: Documentation
url: https://docs.vespa.ai/
- type: GettingStarted
url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/getting-started.html
- type: Tutorials
url: https://docs.vespa.ai/en/learn/tutorials/
- type: GitHubOrganization
url: https://github.com/vespa-engine
- type: GitHubRepository
url: https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa
- type: License
url: https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/blob/master/LICENSE
- type: Blog
url: https://blog.vespa.ai/
- type: BlogRSS
url: https://blog.vespa.ai/feed.xml
- type: Pricing
url: https://cloud.vespa.ai/pricing
- type: Console
url: https://console.vespa-cloud.com/
- type: Slack
url: https://slack.vespa.ai/
- type: Support
url: https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/issues
- type: ChangeLog
url: https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases
- type: SDKs
name: Vespa CLI (Go)
url: https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/tree/master/client/go
- type: SDKs
name: pyvespa (Python)
url: https://github.com/vespa-engine/pyvespa
- type: SDKs
name: pyvespa Documentation
url: https://vespa-engine.github.io/pyvespa/
- type: SDKs
name: vespa-feed-client (Java)
url: https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/tree/master/vespa-feed-client
- type: SDKs
name: vespa-search (JavaScript)
url: https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa-search
- type: SampleApps
url: https://github.com/vespa-engine/sample-apps
- type: PrometheusExporter
url: https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa_exporter
- type: DockerImage
url: https://github.com/vespa-engine/docker-image
- type: GitHubAction
url: https://github.com/vespa-engine/setup-vespa-cli-action
- type: SpectralRules
url: rules/vespa-ai-rules.yml
- type: Vocabulary
url: vocabulary/vespa-ai-vocabulary.yml
- type: JSONLDContext
url: json-ld/vespa-ai-context.jsonld
- type: Plans
url: plans/vespa-ai-plans-pricing.yml
- type: RateLimits
url: rate-limits/vespa-ai-rate-limits.yml
- type: FinOps
url: finops/vespa-ai-finops.yml
- type: Features
data:
- Open-source under Apache 2.0
- Vector search with HNSW indexes
- BM25 text search and hybrid search
- Native tensor and ML model inference at serving time
- YQL (Vespa Query Language) for structured queries
- Multi-phase ranking (match-phase, first-phase, second-phase, global-phase)
- Document API with conditional writes, visits, and JSON Lines streaming
- Multi-tenant namespaces and document groups
- Real-time indexing with sub-100ms query latency
- Distributed content clusters with automatic sharding and replication
- Streaming search mode for personal/private corpora
- Built-in machine learning inference (TensorFlow, ONNX, XGBoost, LightGBM)
- Approximate nearest neighbor and exact nearest neighbor operators
- Application packages with schemas, services.xml, and rank profiles
- Container API for custom searchers, document processors, and handlers
- Self-managed (Apache 2.0) or fully managed Vespa Cloud (AWS, GCP)
- Vespa Cloud Startup plan from $0.05 / vCPU-hour, $0.005 / GiB-memory-hour
- Vespa Cloud Commercial plan with 24/7 1-hour SLA support
- Vespa Cloud Enterprise plan with $20k/month minimum and 15-minute SLA
- Up to 50% volume discounts and 15% committed-spend discount
sources:
- https://cloud.vespa.ai/price-calculator.html
- https://docs.vespa.ai/
updated: '2026-05-25'
- type: UseCases
data:
- name: Hybrid Search
description: Combine BM25 text relevance with vector similarity and structured filters in a single query executed by Vespa's
multi-phase ranking pipeline.
- name: Retrieval Augmented Generation
description: Serve grounded context to large language models by indexing documents, chunks, and embeddings in Vespa and
retrieving them with hybrid search at sub-100ms latency.
- name: Recommendation and Personalization
description: Power recommendation systems with machine-learned ranking, real-time feature updates, and tensor inference
over user and item embeddings.
- name: Ad Targeting and Real-Time Bidding
description: Match candidate ads against user context and serve ranked impressions within tight latency budgets using
Vespa's distributed serving engine.
- name: E-Commerce Search and Browse
description: Combine faceted navigation, structured filters, text relevance, and learned ranking for large product catalogs
with frequent updates.
- name: Streaming Search for Personal Data
description: Run "streaming search" mode that scans a user's personal corpus on demand — ideal for mail, messaging, and
document search where each user has their own private index.
- type: Integrations
data:
- name: AWS
- name: Google Cloud
- name: Prometheus
- name: Grafana
- name: TensorFlow
- name: ONNX Runtime
- name: XGBoost
- name: LightGBM
- name: Kubernetes
- name: LangChain
- name: LlamaIndex
- name: Haystack
integrations:
- name: AWS
- name: Google Cloud
- name: LangChain
- name: LlamaIndex
- name: Haystack
- name: Prometheus
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
email: kin@apievangelist.com