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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).

agent aware

Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles Vespa the way a machine reads it — 69 machine-readable artifacts across 3 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Vespa scores 52.6/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 25/100 (agent aware). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance. Every facet and dimension name is a link: it opens that measurement's page on APIs.io, where the rating runs across the whole catalog — the exact checks that feed it, how every profiled provider distributes on it, and who is at the top of it.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0
Vespa Kin Score — API readiness rating by API Evangelist

Put this on your own site. The badge is drawn live from Vespa's current Kin Score — paste it once and it updates itself every time the score is recomputed. It follows your visitor's light or dark setting, and it links back here so anyone who sees it can read the full breakdown.

<!-- Kin Score · API Evangelist -->
<a href="https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/vespa-ai/"
   title="Vespa on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
  <img src="https://apis.io/badge/vespa-ai.svg"
       alt="Vespa Kin Score — API readiness rating by API Evangelist" width="150" height="150" loading="lazy">
</a>

More shapes, themes and sizes → · Score as JSON · How badges work

How we profile Vespa

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Vespa. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 9

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

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

Scroll within the panel for all 9 ·

Postman Collections 1

A runnable collection turns the contract into something a developer can execute in seconds. We profile them because the fastest way to trust an API is to make a real call against it.

Ready-to-run Postman collections for exercising this provider's APIs.

Open Collections 6

Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

API Collection

OPEN COLLECTION

Vespa Ai Documents API

OPEN COLLECTION

Vespa Query API

OPEN COLLECTION

Vespa Ai Visit API

OPEN COLLECTION

Vespa Query API

OPEN COLLECTION

Vespa Document API

OPEN COLLECTION

Pricing Plans 1

Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the things the Kin Score reads for access clarity — renamed from commercial clarity in rubric 0.12, because a free statutory interface has access terms and no commercial ones.

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Vespa Ai Rate Limits

6 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Features 20

The notable capabilities this provider advertises, captured as structured features so they can be searched and compared instead of read one landing page at a time.

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 within the panel for all 20 ·

Semantic Vocabularies 1

JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.

JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.

Vespa Ai Context

11 classes · 6 properties

JSON-LD

Spectral Rules 2

Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.

Vespa API Rules

5 rules · 4 warnings

SPECTRAL

Vespa API Rules

7 rules · 7 warnings

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 2

Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

VespaDocument

3 properties

JSON SCHEMA

VespaQuery

10 properties

JSON SCHEMA

JSON Structure 1

JSON Structure captures the data shapes in a form built for tooling — a complement to JSON Schema that keeps the model machine-legible.

JSON Structure definitions describing this provider's data shapes.

Vespa Ai Document Structure

0 properties

JSON STRUCTURE

Examples 2

Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.

Example request and response payloads for these APIs.

Security Posture 3

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Vespa Ai Authentication

http · 1 scheme

SECURITY

Vespa Ai Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

SECURITY

Vespa Ai Vulnerability Disclosure

Intigriti · security.txt · contact published

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Vespa Ai Agentic Access

2 operations · 1 acting

2 operations · 1 acting

AGENTIC

Use Cases 6

What developers actually build with this provider — captured so the catalogue answers 'what is this for', not just 'what does this expose'.

What developers build with this provider.

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.

Integrations 12

Pre-built integrations with other platforms tell you where this provider already fits in a stack.

Pre-built integrations with other platforms and tools.

AWS

Google Cloud

Prometheus

Grafana

TensorFlow

ONNX Runtime

XGBoost

LightGBM

Kubernetes

LangChain

LlamaIndex

Haystack

Scroll within the panel for all 12 ·

Resources

Every other property we hold for Vespa — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Get Started 3

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Documentation 2

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Agent Surfaces 2

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

Design & Contract 3

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

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

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/vespa-ai · machine-readable index on apis.io

Where this information came from

This is an independent, third-party profile of Vespa, published by API Evangelist. We do not operate, host, resell, or support these APIs, and we are not affiliated with or endorsed by the company unless stated above. Everything here is built from publicly available information — the company's own site, developer portal, documentation, public repositories, and the specifications it publishes for public use. Nothing is obtained by breaching a system, defeating an access control, or using credentials.

The Kin Score and Agent Readiness rating are independently calculated assessments of a company's public API artifacts, scored against a published rubric. They are not certifications, endorsements, security assessments, or audits.

Corrections, re-scores, and removal are free — no partnership or purchase required, and you do not need to justify the request. A removed company is recorded as unrated, never scored zero for having asked. Acknowledgement within one business day; removal within two.

info@apievangelist.com · Read the full data-sourcing policy →
On a security or compliance team? Put security in the subject line and you will get a person, not a form — we will tell you exactly which public URLs this profile was built from.