# Vespa

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/vespa-ai/  
**Website:** https://vespa.ai  
**APIs profiled:** 9

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).

## Kin Score — 52.6 / 100 (developing)

Scored 2026-08-25 under rubric 0.14.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 52.6).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 72.2 |
| Contract Quality | 56.0 |
| Governance | 28.8 |
| Contract Governance | 28.8 |
| Operational Transparency | 50.0 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 57.1 |
| Commercial Clarity | 50.0 |
| Access Clarity | 50.0 |

## Agent readiness — 24.5 (agent-aware)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | derived |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | bound |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | documented |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |
| Delegated Identity | no |
| Protected Resource Metadata | no |
| Dynamic Client Registration | no |
| Agentic Commerce | no |

## Access

Freemium · Self-serve signup — onboarding: self-serve, pricing: freemium, trial: no (confidence: high).

## APIs (9)

- **Vespa Deploy API** — The Vespa Deploy API (/application/v2) manages application packages on a Vespa configuration server. It supports preparing, activating, and tearing down application packages, se...
- **Vespa Tenant and Application API** — 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 cre...
- **Vespa Config API** — 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 prot...
- **Vespa Cluster Controller API** — The Vespa Cluster Controller API (/cluster/v2) exposes runtime state and management endpoints for a Vespa content cluster — including node state queries, maintenance-mode transi...
- **Vespa State API** — 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 balanc...
- **Vespa Metrics API** — 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 ...
- **Vespa Query API** — The Query API from Vespa — 1 operation(s) for query.
- **Vespa Documents API** — Single-document GET, POST, PUT, DELETE operations
- **Vespa Visit API** — Bulk visit (iteration) operations

## Agentic access (1)

- **Vespa Ai Agentic Access** — 2 operations · 1 acting

## Security (3)

- **Vespa Ai Authentication** — http · 1 scheme
- **Vespa Ai Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC
- **Vespa Ai Vulnerability Disclosure** — Intigriti · security.txt · contact published

## Plans (1)

- **Vespa Ai Plans Pricing**

## Use cases (6)

- **Hybrid Search** — Combine BM25 text relevance with vector similarity and structured filters in a single query executed by Vespa's multi-phase ranking pipeline.
- **Retrieval Augmented Generation** — 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.
- **Recommendation and Personalization** — Power recommendation systems with machine-learned ranking, real-time feature updates, and tensor inference over user and item embeddings.
- **Ad Targeting and Real-Time Bidding** — Match candidate ads against user context and serve ranked impressions within tight latency budgets using Vespa's distributed serving engine.
- **E-Commerce Search and Browse** — Combine faceted navigation, structured filters, text relevance, and learned ranking for large product catalogs with frequent updates.
- **Streaming Search for Personal Data** — 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.

## Tags

Artificial Intelligence, Search, Vector Database, Big Data, Machine-Learning, Semantic Search, Retrieval Augmented Generation, Open-Source, Tensor, Recommendations

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/vespa-ai/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.