Exa
Verified Oct 16, 2026 ActiveWeb search and page-content API built for agents, priced per request with no subscription
Listed on EffectHub ·
Pricing
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- Paid options from
- $0.004/request
- Billing
- Metered · per request
Pay-as-you-go with no subscription or minimum: $10 of free credit that resets to $10 on the first of each month (about 2,500 instant searches), then Search at $4 per 1,000 instant requests or $7 per 1,000 fast/auto, Contents $1 per 1,000 pages, Answer $5 per 1,000, Deep search $12 to $15 per 1,000, and Agent runs from $0.012 to $1 each at fixed effort or metered up to $5 or $20 a run. Enterprise is quoted, with volume discounts, custom QPS and zero data retention.
Use tool ↗About Exa
Exa is a search engine sold as an API for software, not people. Its Search endpoint runs on a neural index and returns full page text or model-extracted excerpts rather than snippets, in latency tiers from an Instant mode near 180 ms to Deep modes that reason for up to 40 seconds; companion endpoints answer questions with citations, monitor pages for change, run multi-step research as an agent, and build structured tables of web entities (Websets). It targets developers grounding LLM apps and coding agents in live web data, with an MCP server and SDKs, and Cognition, HubSpot, CodeRabbit and monday.com among named customers. Pricing is pay-as-you-go from $4 per thousand searches with $10 of free credit that resets monthly; the company is Exa Labs Inc., backed by Benchmark, Lightspeed, a16z, NVIDIA and Y Combinator, valued at $2.2 billion in May 2026.
- Platforms
- API · Web
- API
- Yes
- Last verified
- Oct 16, 2026
Verified sources
- Pricing page: $10 free credit resetting monthly, no subscription or minimum; Search $4 per 1k instant or $7 per 1k fast/auto requests for up to 10 results, $1 per 1k extra results or summaries; Contents $1 per 1k pages; Answer $5 per 1k; Monitors $15 per 1k; Deep search $12 to $15 per 1k; Agent $0.012 to $1 per request fixed or metered up to $5/$20 a run; Enterprise quoted (15 October 2026)exa.ai ↗
- Home page: Search, Contents, Agent and Monitors APIs, Websets, Exa Connect and an MCP server; Instant latency about 178 ms p50; SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA with BAA, zero data retention; customers Cognition, StackAI, Firefox, HubSpot, 11x, CodeRabbit and monday.com (15 October 2026)exa.ai ↗
- About page: footer EXA LABS INC.; CEO Will Bryk, co-founder Jeff Wang; $2.2B valuation in May 2026; investors Benchmark, Lightspeed, a16z, NVIDIA and Y Combinator (15 October 2026)exa.ai ↗
Is Exa legit?
We don’t label tools safe or unsafe. Below are the records we checked ourselves, each with the date we read it.
- Domain registered
- Dec 16, 2017 (8 years ago)Registry record (RDAP), registrar Cloudflare, Inc, looked up Sep 6, 2026
- TLS certificate
- Issued by Let's Encrypt, valid until Nov 16, 2026Seen in our own connection to the site on Oct 16, 2026
- Last checked
- Oct 16, 2026The site answered
- Operated by
- Exa Labs Inc., United StatesOur research, card verified Oct 15, 2026
Pros & cons of 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
Best for
- Developers grounding RAG pipelines, chat assistants or coding agents in live web content
- Teams that need structured lists of web entities, such as companies or papers, rather than ten blue links
- Products that must cite sources, since results come with URLs and extracted passages
Not for
- Anyone wanting a search engine to use by hand; there is no consumer interface beyond the dashboard
- Projects that need guaranteed coverage of a specific site or language, since the index is Exa's own, not Google's
Watch out: The 'auto' agent mode is metered and capped at $5 per run, 'ultra' at $20: a loop that calls the agent per user query can spend in minutes what a month of plain search costs.
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