Head to head
unlob vs Exa
Exa is the best-funded neural search API in the category at a $2.2B valuation. unlob is 10× cheaper than Exa’s Instant search and adds graph traversal and coverage auditing.
Verified 7 October 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages
On the headline rate that is 10× — $4 per 1,000 for Exa’s Instant search, its cheapest comparable mode, against $0.40per 1,000 searches. Other modes cost more; the pricing detail below lists them. Both figures are computed from the published plan tables rather than typed into this page, so they follow the vendors rather than drifting from them.
Price
- unlob$0.40
- Exa$4
| Provider | Own index? | $ / 1,000 searches | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
Priced: Instant search. Instant search is $4 per 1,000 requests (up to 10 results); Fast and Auto are $7 per 1,000, and the Deep modes $12 to $15. Results beyond 10 add $1 per 1,000, contents $1 per 1,000 pages per content type, and AI summaries $1 per 1,000 pages — so a realistic RAG call costs more than the headline. | Yes Proprietary AI-native semantic index | $4 | Exa pricing |
$29 per month for 50,000 credits, and a search is one credit. | Yes Our own crawl and index | $0.58 | This page |
$199 per month for 500,000 credits, and a search is one credit. | Yes Our own crawl and index | $0.40 | This page |
When Exa is the better choice
A comparison page that cannot name a scenario where the competitor wins is an advertisement. Here are the real ones.
Choose Exa
- Websets — building and enriching structured entity sets is a genuinely different product and we have no equivalent.
- Contact enrichment, at $0.02 per email and $0.07 per phone number, for go-to-market workloads.
- A larger index and a longer operating history, which for broad research queries can simply mean better recall.
- Exa Agent, where you want managed research effort levels rather than composing the loop yourself.
Choose unlob
- Price: $0.40 versus $7.00 per 1,000 — and Exa’s effective rate rises with results beyond ten, contents and summaries.
- Evidence with provenance beneath your own model: ground reports source roles, origins, owners, independence and a coverage receipt, and returns no generated answer. Exa's deeper search modes and Agent API do the reasoning for you, on Exa's models.
- Graph traversal over the open web, which Exa does not offer.
- Coverage transparency through why_not.
- Corroboration counts that survive deduplication, for agents that must judge whether a claim is independently reported.
The substantive differences
| Exa | unlob | |
|---|---|---|
| Headline price | $7 per 1,000 for base search, plus $1 per 1,000 for results beyond ten, $1 per 1,000 pages of contents, and $1 per 1,000 for summaries. | $0.40 per 1,000 searches on Scale (a search is one credit), with no surcharges for filters or facets. Every call has a fixed, published price; a graph traversal is 2 credits. |
| Retrieval model | Neural, trained on link prediction. Strong at "find me things like this". | Hybrid by default — BM25 fused with vectors — with a term filter for exact identifiers that semantic search smooths away. |
| Beyond search | Websets, Answer, Monitors, Agent — a product suite. | A coverage graph — six traversal tools over relationships already computed to build the index. |
| Company | $335M+ raised, $2.2B valuation, backed by a16z, Benchmark, Lightspeed and NVIDIA’s venture arm. | Self-funded and smaller. |
Sources
Every figure on this page was read from the vendor's own pricing page or funding announcement on the date shown.
- Exa: Exa pricingread 7 October 2026
- Exa: Exa rate limitsread 7 October 2026
- Exa: Exa Labs raises $250M at $2.2B valuationread 5 August 2026
- Exa: Announcing our Series Bread 5 August 2026
Frequently asked questions
Is unlob a drop-in replacement for Exa?
For plain web search, largely yes — both return ranked results with metadata from their own index, and the filter surfaces overlap. For Websets or contact enrichment there is no equivalent here; those are separate products rather than search parameters.
Why is Exa’s Instant search 10× the price?
Different cost structures rather than different margins. Exa’s pricing has to support a $2.2 billion valuation and a broad product suite; ours has to support a self-funded company with no valuation to grow into. Both of us own our index, so neither is paying a per-query fee upstream — the difference is what each business needs the price to cover.
How much has Exa raised?
$85 million in a Series B led by Benchmark in September 2025 at a $700M valuation, then $250 million led by Andreessen Horowitz in May 2026 at a $2.2 billion valuation.
Check the claims yourself
The free tier is 10,000 credits a month with no card. That is enough to test coverage, latency and result quality against your own queries — which is a better comparison than this page.