October 22, 2026
Exa pricing · you pay to search, then again to read
Exa Lite Search is $4 per 1,000 searches, and reading the pages is $1 per 1,000 more. Below about 16,600 searches a month with one page read each, Exa costs less than Firecrawl.
Exa is a search service built for AI apps. Its cheapest search is $4 per 1,000 searches, pay as you go, and reading the pages those searches find costs $1 per 1,000 pages on top.
The short answer
Pick Exa’s free Starter plan if you want to test. It gives $10 of credit every month, plus a $10 bonus when you sign up, with no card.
Pick Exa pay as you go if your app runs fewer than about 16,600 searches a month and reads one page per search. Below that line, Exa costs less than Firecrawl.
Pick Firecrawl if your app runs more than about 16,600 searches a month and reads a page for each. Standard is $83 a month billed yearly, and search and reading share one pool of credits, the units Firecrawl charges in.
Pick SearchApi if you only need Google results. Developer is $40 a month billed monthly for 10,000 searches, the same as 10,000 Exa Lite searches.
What each Exa search costs
A request is one call your app sends to Exa. A result is one web page that comes back in the list, and every search price below includes up to 10 results. These prices are pay as you go, so you pay for what you use each month.
| Product | What it does | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Lite Search | A fast, basic search | $4 per 1,000 requests |
| Auto Search | Search in Exa’s Auto mode | $7 per 1,000 requests |
| Deep Search | A search that takes several steps and returns a structured answer | $12 per 1,000 requests |
| Answer | A written answer with sources | $5 per 1,000 requests |
| Monitors | A search that runs on a schedule | $15 per 1,000 requests |
| Contents | The full text of a page | $1 per 1,000 pages |
Each result past 10 costs $1 more per 1,000 requests. AI page summaries cost $1 per 1,000 pages.
Exa Agent, a tool that runs a longer research job, costs from $0.012 to $1.00 a run. The price goes up with the effort level you pick.
Search is one meter, and reading is another
Contents is Exa’s name for the page text. A search gives your app a list of pages. If your app also needs the words on those pages, it pays Contents too.
So the price that matches “search and read the top page” is Lite at $4 plus Contents at $1, or $5 per 1,000.
What Exa’s free plan covers
Starter is free and needs no payment method. It gives $10 of credit every month, plus a $10 bonus at signup, and includes Exa’s MCP server, a small add-on that lets an AI assistant like Claude use Exa for you.
The math: on October 22, 2026 prices, $10 ÷ $4 per 1,000 = 2,500 Lite searches a month for free.
QPS means queries per second, the number of searches you can send each second. Starter allows 10. Developer, the pay-as-you-go plan, allows up to 25.
Where Firecrawl costs less
Firecrawl is a tool that reads web pages for your app and can also search. It charges in credits, the unit it spends on each job. A search with 10 results is 2 credits, and reading one page is 1 credit. Standard gives 100,000 credits a month for $83 a month billed yearly.
The math: on October 22, 2026 prices, one search plus one page read costs:
- Exa: $4 ÷ 1,000 + $1 ÷ 1,000 = $0.005.
- Firecrawl: 2 + 1 = 3 credits. Standard’s 100,000 credits cover 100,000 ÷ 3 = 33,333 of those a month for $83.
$83 ÷ $0.005 = 16,600. Above about 16,600 searches a month with one page read each, Firecrawl Standard costs less than Exa Lite. Exa’s free $10 a month moves that line to ($83 + $10) ÷ $0.005 = 18,600.
For 10,000 searches and 10,000 page reads a month:
- Exa Lite: $40 + $10 = $50, or $40 after the free $10.
- Exa Auto: $70 + $10 = $80, or $70 after the free $10.
- Firecrawl: 10,000 × 2 + 10,000 = 30,000 credits, inside Standard’s 100,000 for $83 a month billed yearly.
At 10,000 a month, Exa costs less. Firecrawl pulls ahead past the line, and it has credits left over for scraping, which means copying the text of whole pages or sites.
If you only search
For 10,000 searches a month with no page reads, Exa Lite is $40, pay as you go, and SearchApi Developer is $40 a month billed monthly. SearchApi returns Google results. Exa runs its own search.
Firecrawl Standard, at $83 a month billed yearly, costs more for search alone.
The search fee is a small part of an AI task
Vals, a company that tests AI tools, updated its Web Search Index on October 21, 2026. On its top entry, the search fee was $0.41 of the $8.84 cost per task. The rest was the AI model’s own cost.
So a cheaper search service won’t cut an AI task’s cost by much. Pick by quality first.
Artificial Analysis runs a second test, with data from October 19, 2026. On that board, Exa’s auto search tied for the top score, 80, with Perplexity’s medium setting, and Exa Lite scored 79. Firecrawl scored 73, on a row measured August 17, 2026.
The two tests pick different winners. Vals puts Keenable, another search tool, first, and Artificial Analysis puts Exa and Perplexity on top. Run 20 of your own questions through Exa and one other tool before you pick.
Exa’s prices have moved before
In May 2025, Hacker News user liam-hinzman wrote for Exa’s team: “We charge $5 per 1000 requests with our search and answer endpoints.”
Today Lite Search is $4, Auto is $7 and Answer is $5, per 1,000 requests. Note the date next to any Exa price you plan around.
What to do this week
Sign up for Exa’s free Starter plan and run one week of your real searches. Note the searches you send and the pages you read.
If the week points to more than about 16,600 searches a month with one page read each, start Firecrawl on its free 1,000 credits a month and run the same week there.
Next · Firecrawl vs Exa compares quality and setup · Web search MCP servers prices six search tools for AI assistants · Tavily pricing covers another search tool.
Sources · Exa pricing, Firecrawl pricing and SearchApi pricing, all checked October 22, 2026 · Vals Web Search Index, updated October 21, 2026 · Artificial Analysis search board, data from October 19, 2026.