Exa free tier includes Web search API for AI agents with Search, Contents, Answer, Monitors and Agent endpoints… Verified October 2026. Compare with 9 alternatives in AI / ML.
Why caution: 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 ↗ Full history ↓
A verdict here is not a fixed property of the vendor. A one-off pricing event demotes a vendor while its recorded date falls in the last 180 days and then lapses on its own, with nothing about the vendor having changed; a standing condition — a free tier withdrawn and not restored, a product retired — does not lapse with time. This one rests on a record effective 2026-10-01, so it lapses on 2027-03-31 unless we record something new first.
Subtypes in AI / ML: web_search_api — answers a query with current web results shaped for a model to read. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://exa.ai/pricing, where it says: “Exa is a modern AI search engine with SERP API, website crawler tools, and deep research API” How we use this.
Exa's free tier offers Web search API for AI agents with Search, Contents, Answer, Monitors and Agent endpoints… We rate it caution — one recorded limit reduction, on 2026-10-01. Best for ai / ml workloads — 9 alternatives available.
Web search API for AI agents with Search, Contents, Answer, Monitors and Agent endpoints. The free tier gives $10 in credits each month, up to 2,500 Lite searches, resetting on the first of the month without rollover, plus a one-time $10 onboarding bonus; no credit card or other payment method required. Only a user's first team gets the free credits. Free teams get 10 QPS on search. Search costs $4 per 1,000 requests with up to 10 results for Lite, $7 for Auto, and $12 for Deep. Contents costs $1 per 1,000 pages per content type. Since October 19, 2026, Instant, Fast and Deep Reasoning are legacy search types that keep working at their current prices. Exa recommends Lite in place of Instant and Fast. Search and Contents can also be paid per request over x402 in USDC on Base or Solana, with no API key.
Exa runs its own MCP server. "Use Exa MCP to improve the built-in web search in ChatGPT, Claude, and MCP-compatible tools with Exa’s search capabilities, including web search, code search, Exa Agent, and Exa Connect." (From https://exa.ai/docs/get-started/exa-mcp, read 2026-10-20.) The endpoint is https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp, the transport is HTTP, and authentication uses OAuth sign-in, or an Exa API key in the x-api-key header.
We read that on 2026-10-28 from https://exa.ai/docs/admin/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Exa as "exa" and states "$10" and "$4" and "$12" and "$1".
The Free Tier gives you $10 in credits (up to 2,500 Lite searches) the day you sign up, and your free balance resets to $10 on the first of every month. No payment method required. Complete onboarding in the dashboard and your first team earns a one-time $10 bonus.
How Exa compares against every one of the 9 we list, not against a selection of them. A surface with room for every member of a tied set may rotate their order. A surface with room for only some of them names none of them, because which ones it named would be the claim, and a claim seeded on the date is not the one we serve tomorrow. How we decide this.
| Service | Free Tier | Stability |
|---|---|---|
| Exa | Free | caution |
| Tavily AI | 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. |
stable |
| Brave Search API | 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. |
stable |
| Valyu | 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… |
stable |
| SerpApi | Free Real-time search engine scraping API. Returns structured JSON results for Google, YouTube, Bing, Baidu, Walmart, and many other engines. |
stable |
| You.com | 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. |
stable |
| Parallel | 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. |
stable |
| Linkup | 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. |
stable |
| Jina AI | 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. |
stable |
| Serper | 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. |
stable |
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 AI / ML, with the vendor's own words we read that from on its page. How we decide this.
We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.
curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=Exa
curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Exa