Compare 9 free alternatives to Exa for AI / ML. Every one of their free tier limits side by side, with the read and catalogue dates we hold.

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Best Exa Alternatives with Free Tiers (2026)

9 free alternatives in AI / ML. Sorted by pricing stability.

Current Exa Situation

Risk Level: caution
Why: effective 2026-10-01 — Between 2026-09-16 and 2026-10-01, Exa replaced the $20 sign-up credit with a one-time $10 bonus for completing onboarding, which only a user's first team earns. The $10 monthly credit, available in full on the day of sign-up, continues. Source ↗
Category: AI / ML
Pricing Page: exa.ai/docs/admin/pricing

Recent Pricing Changes (2)

reduced effective 2026-10-01 medium impact
Between 2026-09-16 and 2026-10-01, Exa replaced the $20 sign-up credit with a one-time $10 bonus for completing onboarding, which only a user's first team earns. The $10 monthly credit, available in full on the day of sign-up, continues. Source ↗
reduced effective 2026-07-24 high impact
Between 2026-07-17 and 2026-07-24, Exa replaced its free tier of up to 20,000 requests a month with $10 of credits a month, plus $20 of credits on sign-up. Source ↗

See Exa's full history →

All Free Alternatives (9)

7 of these carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold; their order rotates daily. 2 are demoted with the reason named, and 0 are listed last because they are not generally available or are not a free offer. How we rank.

Left out of this list: Hugging Face (shares no subtype with this product), Groq (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini API (shares no subtype with this product), Mistral AI (shares no subtype with this product), OpenRouter (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare Workers AI (shares no subtype with this product), Cerebras (shares no subtype with this product), Cohere (shares no subtype with this product), OpenAI (shares no subtype with this product), Pinecone (shares no subtype with this product), Qdrant (shares no subtype with this product), Deepgram (shares no subtype with this product), Kaggle (shares no subtype with this product), Roboflow (shares no subtype with this product), Scale AI (shares no subtype with this product), AssemblyAI (shares no subtype with this product), Replicate (shares no subtype with this product), Baseten (shares no subtype with this product), Weights & Biases (shares no subtype with this product), Comet ML (shares no subtype with this product), Clarifai (we have not classified this record), Neptune.ai (we have not classified this record), Labelbox (shares no subtype with this product), Google Colab (shares no subtype with this product), Composio (shares no subtype with this product), DeepAR (none of this category's subtypes apply), Maxim AI (shares no subtype with this product), OCR.Space (shares no subtype with this product), Parseur (shares no subtype with this product), Reducto (shares no subtype with this product), paperspace (shares no subtype with this product), Arize AX (shares no subtype with this product), Audio Enhancer (none of this category's subtypes apply), Braintrust (shares no subtype with this product), Clair (none of this category's subtypes apply), Keywords AI (shares no subtype with this product), Langfuse (shares no subtype with this product), LangSmith (shares no subtype with this product), Langtrace (we have not classified this record), LangWatch (shares no subtype with this product), Lumenfall.ai (shares no subtype with this product), Mediaworkbench.ai (none of this category's subtypes apply), Othor AI (none of this category's subtypes apply), Pollinations.AI (shares no subtype with this product), Portkey (shares no subtype with this product), ReportGPT (none of this category's subtypes apply), Zenable (none of this category's subtypes apply), xAI (shares no subtype with this product), Anthropic API (shares no subtype with this product), GitHub Models (shares no subtype with this product), NVIDIA NIM (shares no subtype with this product), Ollama Cloud (shares no subtype with this product), LLM7.io (shares no subtype with this product), SiliconFlow (shares no subtype with this product), Zhipu AI (shares no subtype with this product), DeepSeek API (shares no subtype with this product), MiniMax (shares no subtype with this product), GPU-Bridge (we have not classified this record), Google Vertex AI Agent Engine (we have not classified this record), Google Vector Search 2.0 (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini Embedding 2 (shares no subtype with this product), Alibaba Cloud Qwen Code (none of this category's subtypes apply), E2B (shares no subtype with this product), Together AI (shares no subtype with this product), Fireworks AI (shares no subtype with this product), Modal (shares no subtype with this product), ElevenLabs (we have not classified this record), Stability AI (we have not classified this record), Daytona (shares no subtype with this product), Blaxel (shares no subtype with this product), Novita Sandbox (shares no subtype with this product), Runloop (shares no subtype with this product), Mem0 (shares no subtype with this product), Zep (shares no subtype with this product), Letta (we have not classified this record), Supermemory (shares no subtype with this product), Cognee (shares no subtype with this product), Hetzner Inference API (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare AI Search (we have not classified this record). Each is still listed in its category, with the vendor's own words we read that from on its page. How we decide this.

Linkup stable
Free
Web search API for AI agents. Accounts created with a professional email address get $20 of credit, topped back up to $20 each month (Linkup's docs); the pricing page calls this 4,000 free queries and states no period.
AI / ML Read 2026-11-13 · catalogue date 2026-09-27
Profile
Parallel stable
Free
Web search and research APIs for AI agents. Organizations with a credit card on file get $5 of free credit each month, and unused credit expires at month end.
AI / ML Read 2026-11-03 · catalogue date 2026-09-27
Profile
Brave Search API stable
Free
$5 in free credits every month, applied automatically. Brave's "up to $20" figure is $5 on each of four plans: Search, Answers, Spellcheck and Autosuggest.
AI / ML Read 2026-10-26 · confirmed 2026-10-03
Profile
Valyu stable
Free
Search and research API for AI agents: one credit balance covers Search, Contents and DeepResearch. Accounts without a plan get free credits every month, which reset and do not roll over: 2,000 with a work email, no card needed; 1,000 with a personal or university email, which needs a card on the…
AI / ML Read 2026-11-12
Profile
You.com stable
Free
Web Search API for AI agents. 100 free queries a day with no API key or account through the keyless MCP profile (api.you.com/mcp?profile=free), limited to the you-search and you-discover tools.
AI / ML Read and confirmed 2026-11-03
Profile
Tavily AI stable
Free
Real-time web search API for AI agents, with search, extract, crawl and research endpoints. The free Researcher plan gives 1,000 API credits per month with no credit card required, resetting on the first of each month.
AI / ML Read and confirmed 2026-10-26
Profile
SerpApi stable
Free
Real-time search engine scraping API. Returns structured JSON results for Google, YouTube, Bing, Baidu, Walmart, and many other engines.
AI / ML Read and confirmed 2026-10-29
Profile
Serper stable
Free Credits
Google Search API returning real-time results. 2,500 free queries when you sign up, no credit card required; a plain search uses one credit, and Maps and Lens searches use 3.
AI / ML Read and confirmed 2026-11-12
Profile
−2 time_limited_offer Tier "Free Credits" is a credit grant that runs out, not an ongoing free tier.
Jina AI stable
Free Credits
Search, Reader, embeddings and reranker APIs. Each new API key comes with 10M free tokens, shared across these APIs; no page says they renew.
AI / ML Read 2026-11-13 · confirmed 2026-10-21
Profile
−2 time_limited_offer Tier "Free Credits" is a credit grant that runs out, not an ongoing free tier.
Recompute today's order yourself. The order above is a permutation seeded only on the UTC date and the query key — no vendor name, slug, id or offer field is an input. The algorithm is published, so anyone can reproduce this page's order without asking us.
date
2026-11-14
query_key
alternative-to:Exa
seed
117e3c9c42b4a8e8c51609001055de3c2d018b09635e3e950918a24100e2bd5e
tie_count
7

Category Trends

See the broader pricing landscape for this category.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best free alternatives to Exa?
We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 9 free alternatives to Exa, each listed below with its tier, category and the read and catalogue dates we hold. Of those, 7 carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold, so they are listed in an order that rotates daily, 2 are demoted with the reason named. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.
Is Exa's free tier still available?
Exa has a free tier (Free), but it's flagged as "caution" because of one specific recorded change, on 2026-10-01: Between 2026-09-16 and 2026-10-01, Exa replaced the $20 sign-up credit with a one-time $10 bonus for completing onboarding, which only a user's first team earns. The $10 monthly credit, available in full on the day of sign-up, continues. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20261001232535/https://exa.ai/docs/admin/pricing
How many free alternatives to Exa exist?
There are 9 free alternatives to Exa tracked on AgentDeals across the AI / ML category.
Has Exa changed their pricing?
Exa has 2 recorded pricing changes. The most recent was on 2026-10-01: Between 2026-09-16 and 2026-10-01, Exa replaced the $20 sign-up credit with a one-time $10 bonus for completing onboarding, which only a user's first team earns. The $10 monthly credit, available in full on the day of sign-up, continues. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20261001232535/https://exa.ai/docs/admin/pricing