Exa API pricing: search, contents, answer and agent costs

Exa API pricing is per request, and the price depends on which search you ask for. Lite search is the cheapest, Auto search costs more and Deep search the most; page contents, answers and monitors each have their own rate, and the Agent API bills by effort. Every account gets free credits each month without a card.

So the real question is not "how much is Exa" but "which Exa call does my agent make, and how often". This post reads Exa's pricing page as it stood on 2026-11-03, lays out each endpoint's price, explains the extras that change a bill (more results, page summaries, contents), and shows the same search per call through looot with live prices.

Exa API pricing per endpoint

Exa prices six endpoints per 1,000 requests or pages. Search prices include up to 10 results; each result above 10 adds a small fee per 1,000 requests, and AI page summaries add another. Contents is priced per page and per content type, so asking for both text and highlights counts twice.

Exa's page says search latency is configurable from about 450 milliseconds to one second, and the search type is where you choose. Lite fits an agent loop that calls search many times per task. Deep fits a single hard question where a better first answer saves follow-up calls.

What makes an Exa bill bigger than the base price?

Three settings add to the base price of a search, and an agent framework can turn them on without you noticing:

1. More than 10 results. Each extra result above 10 is billed per 1,000 requests.
2. Page summaries. An AI summary per returned page is billed per 1,000 pages.
3. Contents with the search. Asking for page text and highlights in the same call bills Contents on each page, per content type.

A search that asks for 25 results with text and summaries can cost several times the base search price. Check the parameters your framework or MCP client sends before you budget from the table.

Exa plans, free credits and the Agent API

Exa has a free plan, pay as you go and Enterprise. The free plan gives credits each month plus an onboarding bonus with no payment method, and access to every endpoint. Pay as you go raises the search rate limit; Enterprise adds zero data retention and up to 1,000 results per search.

The Agent API runs asynchronous research and returns structured output with citations. On the default effort, auto, the cost scales with the task, so you cannot know it before the run. If you need a fixed price per request, set a fixed effort level.

What does one Exa search cost through looot?

Through your own Exa key, you pay Exa's price for each call from your Exa balance. Through looot, your agent calls Exa per request from one prepaid balance shared with every other provider, and sees the price before each call. The table below reads looot's live price for Exa's jobs and for other search providers when the page loads.

The setup is on the Exa MCP page, and the ranked list of search providers with what each returns is on the best web search API page. For the agent job end to end, see the web search API use case. How Exa's prices sit next to other search vendors' is in web search API pricing, and Tavily's setup is on the Tavily MCP page.

Exa key or per-call route?

Use your own Exa key if Exa is your only search provider and the free credits cover a good part of your volume. Use a per-call route when your agent mixes Exa with other providers, falls back to another search on a miss, or needs company and contact data in the same task, and you want one balance instead of one account per vendor.

Run it with an agent

Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor or any agent that reads a skill file.

What it cannot do

• Exa's Agent API and Websets. The live table covers search, answer and page contents, not Exa's asynchronous Agent runs or Websets.
• Exa Monitors. Re-running a search on a timer needs scheduled runs, not available yet in looot.
• Free credit. looot has no free trial credit; you top up a prepaid balance first. See pricing.

Last checked 2026-11-03. Exa's prices were read that day from the page linked in each table. looot prices are read from the live catalog when the page loads.