Context.dev vs Exa

Context.dev

Context.dev is a sensible pick when you want scraping, crawling, search and brand data behind one key and one bill instead of stitching three vendors together. The credit table is published per endpoint, so costs are predictable for plain scrapes; the heavier calls — answers, brand lookups, enrichment — burn credits ten to twenty times faster, and that is where a budget goes.

Pros

• +One API and credit balance covers scrape, crawl, search, answers, monitors and brand data
• +Free tier of 1,000 credits a month with no card
• +Credit cost per endpoint and overage rates are published on the pricing page
• +SDKs, a CLI and an MCP server for agent use

Cons

• −Answers, brand and style-guide lookups cost 10 credits and person enrichment 20, so mixed workloads drain plans quickly
• −Recent rebrand from Brand.dev means older docs and integrations may still use the old name
• −Developer tier caps concurrency at 10 requests

Exa

Exa is the search API to reach for when the consumer is a model rather than a person: it hands back page text and excerpts an LLM can use directly, and the Instant tier is fast enough to sit inside a chat turn. The pay-as-you-go pricing is cheap at the entry and transparent, but the menu is long, and the Deep and Agent modes can cost a hundred times a plain search, so a prototype that upgrades its search mode casually gets a surprising bill. It is not a product for anyone who wants a search box; there is no end-user app, only a dashboard and the API.

Pros

• +Returns full page text or relevant excerpts, so results are usable by a model without a second crawl
• +$10 of free credit every month with no card, enough to prototype on
• +Instant tier with roughly 180 ms median latency for in-conversation search
• +Deep search, Answer, Monitors, Websets and an Agent endpoint cover research jobs beyond one query
• +SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA with a BAA and zero data retention options for regulated buyers

Cons

• −Pricing has many line items: results beyond ten, summaries, content types and agent compute are each metered separately
• −Deep and Agent modes cost $12 to $1,000 per thousand requests, so mode choice drives the bill more than volume
• −Its own index is smaller than a general web engine's, so recall on obscure or very recent pages varies
• −Headquarters and founding details are not stated on the site

Is Context.dev cheaper than Exa?

They charge in different units, so there is no like-for-like answer: Context.dev starts at $19/mo, Exa at $0.004/request. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it.

Does Context.dev or Exa have a free tier?

Both: Context.dev has a free tier, and Exa has a free tier.

Which has a public API, Context.dev or Exa?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.