Search and agent API over an index Exa says serves 100 billion pages, plus a publications index, priced from $4 per 1,000 searches.
Engineers building their own research agent who want the retrieval layer, the page content and optional multi-step agent runs from one vendor, with per-request prices published for every mode from instant search to deep-reasoning. It is a fit for products that must cite: results carry URLs and query-relevant highlights, and structured runs return field-level sources and confidence under output.grounding. The roughly 350-million-work publications index makes it usable for scientific retrieval as well as open-web research.
Not a finished research product for non-developers: there is no consumer app tier, and the free allowance is $10 of credits a month, about 2,500 instant searches, resetting on the first. Result volume is gated: the pricing page places requests above 25 results and up to 1,000 results per search on Enterprise, while the Search reference says results can be raised to 100 without pagination, so the two pages disagree and self-serve limits should be confirmed. Agent runs in metered modes have no fixed price, billing actual usage up to a per-run cap of $5 on auto or $20 on ultra, on top of $0.10 per Agent Compute Unit and $0.005 per search call.
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Its FAQ states the index tracks 1.4 trillion URLs and serves 100 billion pages as of August 2026, organised into eight categories: News, Code & Docs, Companies & People, Financial Markets, Research Publications, Legal & Public Records, Sports, Weather & Places, and Cybersecurity. A July 2026 post adds a dedicated publications index of roughly 350 million works and about 30 million authors.
Yes. Its homepage shows FRAMES 54.4 against Perplexity 44.5 and Brave 21.6, Tip-of-Tongue 54.2 against 36.7 and 19.3, Seal0 36.0 against 34.5 and 8.2, and category scores for company, people and code search. Its publications post reports 86.4% recall against Perplexity 66.8% and Google Scholar 28.0%, though the same post also states 82.8% and gives no query count.
Search is priced per request: instant $4 per 1,000, fast and auto $7 per 1,000, deep and deep-lite $12 per 1,000, deep-reasoning $15 per 1,000, each covering 10 results. Agent runs can be fixed-effort, from $0.012 at minimal to $1.00 at xhigh, or metered against a $5 or $20 per-run cap at $0.10 per Agent Compute Unit plus $0.005 per search.
Yes, within limits. Sign-up gives $10 of credits, which Exa says covers up to 2,500 instant searches, and the balance resets to $10 on the first of each month with no payment method required. Completing onboarding adds a one-time $10 team bonus. Beyond that it is pay-as-you-go, with no subscription and no minimum spend stated.
Facts sourced from the vendor’s own site, last verified 2026-10-10.
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