Exa Pricing and Review: What It Costs and Who It Fits (2026)

Exa is pay as you go, with search at $4 to $15 per 1,000 requests and page contents at $1 per 1,000 pages. Fixed-effort Agent runs cost $0.012 to $1.00 each, and new accounts get $10 of free credit a month. For web search, Exa costs less per search unless your Crustdata plan prices a credit below Exa's $0.004 to $0.007 per search. For people discovery and lists, the cost depends on your Crustdata plan's credit price and the fields you need, and the comparison table below shows the credits per job. We counted 110+ teams who raised Exa on our sales calls. The most common setup we heard, from 20 of those teams, was Exa for web search with a structured people data source next to it.

Written by Crustdata, which sells a people and company data API. Exa prices checked 16 October 2026 from Exa's pricing page and pricing docs. Last updated 16 October 2026.

How much does Exa cost?

Exa charges per request, with search from $4 to $15 per 1,000 requests depending on how much reasoning you ask for. Each search price covers up to 10 results, and Exa's March 3, 2026 pricing update made page contents for those 10 results part of the price.

Checked 16 October 2026 on exa.ai/docs/admin/pricing.

Exa's Agent handles multi-step research and list building, and it is priced per run. You can pick a fixed effort for a flat price, or let it bill by usage.

Checked 16 October 2026 on exa.ai/pricing and exa.ai/docs/admin/pricing.

Exa has three plans. Starter is free, with $10 of credit a month, a one-time $10 bonus for finishing onboarding, and no card needed. Developer is pay as you go by card or bank account. Enterprise is custom, with volume discounts, up to 1,000 results per search, zero data retention and SSO. Exa changed its search prices on March 3, 2026 and launched its Agent in June 2026, according to its changelog. Check the date on any Exa price you read.

How does Exa's pricing work?

Exa bills from a prepaid dollar balance, with no subscription and no minimum spend. Every request draws down the balance at the rates above. When the balance reaches zero, requests stop with an HTTP 402 error unless you have turned on auto recharge.

Exa bills in three units. A request is one API call, so a $7 rate per 1,000 requests is $0.007 a call. A result is one item in a search response, which the base price covers for the first 10. A page is one URL returned by the Contents endpoint, where each view of a page is billed separately. Exa's search guide applies the same rule to search, since asking for both text and highlights "returns and bills two views of the same page".

Rate limits are set per team, across all its keys. Search allows 10 queries per second by default, Deep Search allows 5 and Contents allows 100. Pay-as-you-go teams move to 25 search queries per second for 90 days after buying $1,000 of credit within 30 days, according to Exa's billing docs.

What does a real job cost on Exa?

At Exa's published rates, a thousand web searches cost $4 to $7, while pulling 1,000 people profiles costs roughly $1 to $2 before any contact data. We worked out the jobs below from Exa's price list only. We did not test them. The people rows assume people search bills at the Fast or Auto rate with one content view.

Exa list prices checked 16 October 2026. Enterprise discounts are not shown.

Exa's docs leave two of the worked-job numbers unclear. They do not say whether results 11 and up carry a contents charge, which is why the profile rows show a range. Exa's pricing docs also list "requests above 25 results" as an Enterprise feature. Its search guide says a request can return up to 100 results, so we priced both.

What makes an Exa bill grow?

On search, the number of results per request is the biggest lever on the bill. After that come extra content views, deeper search modes and Agent effort.

• Each result above 10 adds $1 per 1,000. A search asking for 100 results (Enterprise) costs about 14 times a 10-result search ($0.097 against $0.007).

• Asking for text and highlights on the same page bills two views instead of one.

• AI page summaries cost $1 per 1,000 pages on any endpoint that returns them.

• Deep costs $12 and Deep-Reasoning $15 per 1,000 requests, against $7 for Fast.

• Agent effort spans $0.012 to $1.00 a run. Metered runs bill up to $5 in auto mode and $20 in Ultra unless you set your own cap.

• Agent runs that pull from Exa Connect partner sources pay each provider on top, for example Fiber.ai at $0.02 per credit, according to Exa's pricing docs.

• Search has no pagination, so a bigger list needs more distinct queries whose overlap you remove yourself.

Start on Fast search with 10 results and one content view. Add results, Deep modes or Agent effort only where a test shows the answer improves.

How is Exa Websets priced?

Websets is billed in its own credits, which are separate from the Search API balance, and the Websets API only works on a paid Websets plan. Verified results, enrichments, contact data, imports and previews each use Websets credits. The free plan caps a webset at 25 verified results. The plan prices are on Exa's Websets billing page, and Exa's Websets docs now point new list-building work to the Agent instead.

Where does Exa fall short for people and company data?

Exa falls short when you need filters on exact people or company fields, a total count of matches or pagination through a long list. Its people and company search does return structured records with work history, education, headquarters and founding year. But you describe the people you want in plain language. Exa's search guide says search does not support pagination, and the API reference shows no total count in the response. Contact data is an Agent add-on that is billed per contact found. Exa says it has indexed 1B+ people and that its pipeline is built for 50M+ updates a week.

Teams we talk to have complained that Exa's people results fall short for precise work, with low precision on specific searches, profiles that are out of date and results that come back incomplete. The longer argument, with the filters and checks that matter for people search, is in why Exa doesn't work for structured people search.

Is Exa or Crustdata cheaper for a people list?

For a people list, the cheaper option depends on your Crustdata plan's credit price and the fields you need. For web search, Exa costs less per search unless your Crustdata plan prices a credit below Exa's $0.004 to $0.007 per search. Crustdata costs $0.30 to $0.01 per credit, lower depending on plan, so the table shows Crustdata in credits per job next to Exa in dollars, using the credit costs in Crustdata's public pricing docs.

Exa prices checked 16 October 2026 on exa.ai. Crustdata credit costs checked 16 October 2026 on docs.crustdata.com/general/pricing.

The Crustdata credit range comes from how its search is billed. A people search costs 0.03 credits per result for basic fields. Filtering on work-history fields adds 0.1, and receiving them adds another 0.1, so 1,000 results cost 30 to 230 credits. Enriching 35 people with a base profile and a business email costs 2 credits each, or 70 credits. Crustdata's web search costs 1 credit per query and returns a title, URL and short snippet. Full page text needs a separate fetch at 1 credit per page.

To compare a job yourself, multiply the credits by your plan's credit price and set the result next to the Exa column. Web search is the clearest case. One Crustdata credit buys one search, while Exa charges $0.004 to $0.007, so Exa is cheaper per search unless your credit price is under $0.007 (or $0.004 against Instant). Crustdata returns records you filter on exact fields. The Crustdata pricing page lists 1B+ people, 60M+ companies and 350+ filters, refreshed every 1 to 30 days. Exa returns ranked matches to a plain-language description.

One team in an early test described its setup in four words, "It's EXA plus Crustdata." We sell the second half of that sentence, so read this table with that in mind. The full feature-by-feature comparison is on our Exa alternative page.

Who is Exa a good fit for, and who outgrows it?

Exa is good at fast, low-cost search over the open web for agents and products.

• Web search and grounding for agents and retrieval-augmented generation

• Coding agents that need up-to-date documentation

• News and change monitoring through scheduled Monitors

• Broad discovery of companies or people from a plain-language description, where a ranked list is enough

• Teams that want usage pricing with no subscription or minimum

Teams outgrow Exa as the only data source when the output has to be an exact list of people or companies filtered on fields like current title, headcount or funding stage. That list also needs a count you can trust and contact data attached. Our suggestion for those teams is to keep Exa for web search and add a structured people data source.

What is our verdict on Exa?

Pay for Exa when the job is web search or broad discovery from a plain-language description. For web search it costs less per search than Crustdata unless your Crustdata plan prices a credit below $0.004 to $0.007, and the free $10 a month covers 2,500 Instant searches, enough to test it. For people discovery, the cheaper option depends on your Crustdata plan's credit price and the fields you need, as the comparison table shows. Crustdata is the better fit when the output has to be exact people and company records with contact data. Exa search has no filters on people fields like title or headcount, no total count and no pagination. On our calls, 20 of the 110+ teams who raised Exa used it next to a structured people data source, and that is the setup we would pick too.

Exa pricing FAQ

How does Crustdata's API pricing compare to Exa?

Exa's API costs $4 to $15 per 1,000 search requests, $1 per 1,000 pages for contents and $0.012 to $1.00 per fixed-effort Agent run. For web search, Exa charges $0.004 to $0.007 per search against 1 Crustdata credit per query, so Exa costs less per search unless your Crustdata plan prices a credit below that. For a people list with work emails, Crustdata uses 100 to 300 credits for 1,000 results and 35 emails, against $1.58 to $2.57 plus an Agent run on Exa, so the cheaper option depends on your plan's credit price.

Is Exa free?

Exa is free up to $10 of credit a month on its Starter plan, reset on the first of each month. New accounts also get a one-time $10 bonus for finishing onboarding. No card is needed. That covers up to 2,500 Instant searches a month at $4 per 1,000.

Does Exa give you emails and phone numbers?

Exa gives you emails and phone numbers through its Agent. It charges $0.02 per email and $0.07 per phone number found, on top of the Agent run, as of 16 October 2026. Search results alone do not include contact data.

Do I even need Exa if I already have a people data API?

You need Exa, or another web search API, if your agent also searches the open web for news, documents or company pages. A people data API covers people and company records. Crustdata also has web search at 1 credit per query, though Exa is cheaper per search unless your Crustdata credit price is below $0.004 to $0.007.

Why would a team pick Crustdata over Exa?

Teams pick Crustdata over Exa when they need to filter people and companies on exact fields and get contact data from the same API. Teams that mainly need web search can keep Exa for that part.

Do teams pay less using separate providers for web search and people data?

Yes for web search, unless your Crustdata credit price is under Exa's $0.004 to $0.007 per search, because Crustdata charges 1 credit per query. For people and company lists, the cost depends on your plan with each provider, so price the same job on each, as in the table above.

What happens when your Exa credits run out?

Exa's API returns an HTTP 402 error once your balance hits zero, and an agent calling it can stop mid-task. Auto recharge in the Exa dashboard tops the balance up before that happens.

How good is Exa AI?

Exa works well for web search inside agents, because it is fast, priced per request and has no subscription. On our calls, 11 of the 110+ teams who raised Exa said they were happy with it.

Sources and method

Every Exa price on this page was fetched on 16 October 2026. The sources are exa.ai/pricing, Exa's pricing docs, billing and rate limits, search guide, changelog and Websets docs. The people index figures come from Exa's people search benchmark post of December 17, 2025.

Crustdata credit costs come from docs.crustdata.com/general/pricing, fetched on 16 October 2026. Crustdata's credit price range comes from Crustdata, and this page shows Crustdata costs in credits.

The worked jobs are arithmetic from Exa's and Crustdata's published rates. We did not test them, and they leave out Enterprise discounts.

For the call figures, we searched our 2025 and 2026 sales call transcripts for Exa and counted the teams where someone outside Crustdata raised it. At least 110 teams did under our strictest count, and the theme counts come from reading every one of those lines. No customer is named and no customer's price is shown.