Exa

What is Exa?

Exa is a web search API built for AI applications and agents. You send a natural-language query, and Exa searches its own index of about 100 billion pages by meaning and returns relevant excerpts with source URLs, rather than a list of links. Separate endpoints cover search, fetching page contents, cited answers, scheduled monitors and an asynchronous Agent for deep research, list building and contact enrichment. Search types range from a fast lite mode to deep and deep-reasoning modes that trade latency for thoroughness. Teams use it for model training data, assistants that need live answers, coding agents, sales prospecting and finance research. Pricing is pay-as-you-go with no subscription: search is $7 per 1,000 requests, the Free tier adds $10 in credits every month, and Enterprise adds volume pricing, SLAs and zero data retention.

Use cases

• Add web search to an AI agent
• Get cited answers to questions via API
• Fetch full text for known URLs
• Monitor the web for new events
• Build and enrich lead lists
• Research companies and people
• Collect web data for model training

Who it's for

• AI developers
• Enterprise engineering teams
• Sales and GTM teams
• Finance analysts

Why use Exa

• Returning passages instead of whole pages means fewer tokens per answer, which lowers downstream LLM cost.
• Pay-as-you-go billing with no subscription or minimum spend suits prototypes as well as larger workloads.
• Different search types let you pick low latency for chat or deeper research for harder questions.
• Enterprise plans add SLAs, zero data retention, HIPAA with a BAA and SOC 2 Type II audited controls.
• One API covers search, content retrieval, answers, monitoring and agent research.

Exa features

• Search that retrieves pages by meaning from a 100 billion page index
• Token-efficient highlights that return only passages answering the query
• Deep search types: deep-lite, deep and deep-reasoning
• Contents endpoint for full text, highlights and summaries of known URLs
• Answer endpoint that returns an LLM answer with citations
• Monitors that run scheduled searches for new events
• Agent API with fixed effort levels for async research and enrichment
• Email and phone contact enrichment inside Agent runs
• Custom indexes, higher rate limits and zero data retention on Enterprise

Exa integrations

• Fiber.ai
• Baselayer
• Stripe

How to get started with Exa

1. Create an account and get an API key; the Free tier includes monthly credits.
2. Call the search endpoint with a natural-language query and choose a search type such as lite or deep.
3. Request highlights, full text or summaries in the response, and use the returned source URLs for citations.
4. Add credits on the billing dashboard, or turn on auto recharge, once you outgrow the free credits.
5. Move to an Enterprise plan for custom rate limits, SLAs and zero data retention.

Exa limitations

• Free tier is limited to $10 in monthly credits, which do not roll over, and does not include Exa Snapshot
• Default rate limits are 10 QPS for search, with 5 QPS for deep search types
• Requests return 402 Payment Required once prepaid credits run out
• Results above 10 per request and AI page summaries are billed on top of the base price

Exa pricing

Yes, Exa has a free plan.

Exa plans

• Free

  $10 in credits/month

  plus a one-time $10 onboarding bonus

  • 10 QPS rate limit
  • 50 active Agent runs
  • Does not include Exa Snapshot

• Pay as you go

  $7 /1k requests

  search; prepaid credits, no minimum spend

  • 10 QPS, up to 25 QPS
  • Answer at $5 / 1k requests
  • Contents at $1 / 1k pages
  • Auto recharge from $5 to $10,000

• Enterprise

  Custom

  • Volume pricing and postpaid invoicing
  • SLAs and MSAs
  • Zero Data Retention
  • Custom rate limits and indexes

Plans as listed on the official pricing page on 24 Oct 2026. Prices can change and may vary by country or exclude tax. Check the official pricing page.

Exa alternatives

The main Exa alternatives listed on Debuly are Tavily, Brave Search API, Parallel, SerpApi, Firecrawl and Serper. The table compares pricing and platforms; order is A–Z.

1. 

   Brave Search API

   Search API built on Brave's own web index, with LLM Context, web, news, image, video and place endpoints for apps and AI agents.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   PaidVisit Brave Search API (official site)
2. 

   Firecrawl

   Web data API for AI agents: search, scrape, crawl and interact with websites and get clean content back, with a free tier.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit Firecrawl (official site)
3. 

   Parallel

   Pay-as-you-go web APIs for AI agents: search, extract, deep research, cited answers, monitoring and entity lists.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit Parallel (official site)
4. 

   SerpApi

   Real-time search engine results API that returns Google and other SERP data as structured JSON, handling proxies and CAPTCHAs.

   Developer platformsMarketing and SEOResearch and search
   FreemiumVisit SerpApi (official site)
5. 

   Serper

   Google Search API that returns organic results, knowledge graph and related data as structured JSON in one to two seconds.

   Developer platformsMarketing and SEOResearch and search
   FreemiumVisit Serper (official site)
6. 

   Tavily

   Web search, extraction and crawling API built for AI agents and RAG, with a free tier of 1,000 credits a month.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit Tavily (official site)

Exa FAQ

Sources & verification

Facts on this page come from the official sources below, each with the date we read it. Written by Debuly; the vendor did not review this page.

Image credits

• Logo: from exa.ai · fetched 23 Oct 2026 · Vendor trademark, used only to identify the product; removed on request
• Cover: none collected yet, so a generated tile is shown.

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