It's really poor wording. Bright Data does indeed consider 100 results in a single request to be a single billed "result" event, billed at $1.5/1000 requests.
I always set 100 results per request from Bright Data, and I can see my bill indeed says `SERP Requests: x reqs @ 1.5 $/CPM` (where `x` is the number of requests I've made, not x * 100).
https://docs.brightdata.com/scraping-automation/serp-api/faq...
For serper.dev, they consider 10 results to be 1 "credit", and 20 to 100 results to be 2 "credits". They bill at $50/50,000 credits, so it becomes $1/1000 requests if you are okay with just 10 results per request, or $2/1000 requests if you want 100 results per request.
(Both providers here scale pricing with larger volumes, just trying to compare the easiest price point for those getting started.)