Exa alternatives
Neural, embeddings-first search over a proprietary index, sold alongside content extraction, answers and agentic research products.
Verified 5 August 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages
Exa at a glance
- Vendor
- Exa Labs
- Category
- Own-index search APIs
- Own index
- Yes — Proprietary AI-native semantic index
- Price per 1,000
- $7
- Free tier
- $20 in credits at signup, then $10 in credits per month
- MCP server
- Yes
- Graph traversal
- No
- Coverage transparency
- No
- Funding
- $335M+ · $2.2B valuation
- Investors
- Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark, Lightspeed, Y Combinator, NVentures (NVIDIA)
Pricing detail. Base search is $7 per 1,000 requests. Results beyond the first 10 add $1 per 1,000, contents add $1 per 1,000 pages, and AI summaries another $1 per 1,000 — so a realistic RAG call costs more than the headline.
The alternatives
unlob
$0.40/1kOur own index, admitted rather than ranked. Metadata-only passage hits, six coverage-graph traversal tools, an MCP server, and an endpoint that tells you why any URL is or is not in the index. Smaller than the well-funded incumbents, and considerably cheaper than all of them.
Parallel Search
$1/1kA suite of web search, extraction and research APIs on a proprietary index, from the former Twitter CEO. The closest competitor to unlob by thesis.
Brave Search API
$5/1kA genuinely independent index of 40B+ pages, sold as a conventional search API with an LLM-context option. Long the default independent choice.
Free developer tier removed February 2026
Mojeek
A UK independent crawler and index, running since 2004. Small by comparison, but genuinely its own — and the oldest independent index still standing.
DataForSEO
$0.60/1kIndustrial SERP infrastructure built for SEO tooling rather than agents. The cheapest per query in the field, with the lowest-level API to match.
Serper
$1/1kThe cheapest way to get raw Google results into an agent. Fast, minimal, and entirely dependent on Google continuing to be scrapeable.
Google Custom Search JSON API
$5/1kGoogle's own programmable search endpoint. Real Google results, a hard 10,000/day ceiling, and terms written for site search rather than agents.
Grounding with Google Search
$14/1kGoogle's first-party grounding for Gemini. The best index in the world, billed per search query on top of tokens, and only usable from Gemini.
Perplexity Sonar
$14/1kSearch and synthesis in one call. You get an answer rather than results, which is convenient until you need to control retrieval yourself.
Sources
- Exa pricingread 5 August 2026
- Exa Labs raises $250M at $2.2B valuationread 5 August 2026
- Announcing our Series Bread 5 August 2026
Frequently asked questions
What is the best alternative to Exa?
It depends what you are replacing. If you need an independent index at the lowest price, unlob is $0.40 per 1,000 queries against Exa's $7. If you need the largest possible index, Exa may still be the right tool — we say so on our comparison page rather than pretending otherwise.
Does Exa own its own web index?
Yes — Proprietary AI-native semantic index. That matters because a provider without its own index inherits the deprecation and repricing risk of whoever it depends on.
How much does Exa cost?
Base search is $7 per 1,000 requests. Results beyond the first 10 add $1 per 1,000, contents add $1 per 1,000 pages, and AI summaries another $1 per 1,000 — so a realistic RAG call costs more than the headline.
Try the cheapest own-index alternative
10,000 free requests a month, no card. Test coverage and latency against your own queries before you commit to anything.