No free plan. The cheapest way in is Starter at Free; $20 signup credit plus $10/month. Consider free alternatives in the ai search api category if budget is tight.
Exa is built natively for AI consumption rather than human browsing. It offers neural/semantic search over a custom-built web index, returns clean parsed content (not HTML), and exposes endpoints like Answer, Contents, and Websets that are designed around RAG and agent workflows rather than around displaying SERPs to end users.
Yes. Exa provides a free tier with monthly API credits so developers can try the Search, Contents, and Answer endpoints before upgrading. Paid plans add higher rate limits, more credits, and access to advanced features like Websets and Deep Research.
Yes. Exa publishes official SDKs, integrates with popular agent frameworks, and ships an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that lets MCP-aware clients such as Claude and Cursor call Exa as a native tool without custom glue code.
Websets is a higher-level product that turns a natural-language description of an entity type (for example, 'Series B fintech startups in Europe hiring engineers') into a structured dataset of matching results with enriched columns. The Search API returns ranked URLs for a single query, while Websets orchestrates many searches plus enrichment to produce a spreadsheet-style output.
Exa is positioned specifically for production RAG and agent use cases. It offers the Contents API for clean text retrieval, supports filtering by domain and date for grounding control, and provides citations from the Answer endpoint. Teams should still benchmark recall and latency against their specific corpus needs before relying on it as the sole retrieval layer.
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Last verified March 2026