Exa alternatives
For 10,000 searches a month in each API's default search type, Exa costs $70. 6 of the 9 other APIs we price cost less, from $10 on Serper (Google results only), $720 a year less. Of the APIs built for AI, Brave Search API, Jina Reader search, Linkup, Perplexity Search API and You.com cost $50. At 100,000 a month, Exa costs $700.
| API | 10,000 a month | Against Exa, a year | 100,000 a month | Cheaper in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exa | $70 | – | $700 | – |
| Serper Google results | $10 | −$720 | $75 | 3 of 4 |
| Brave Search API | $50 | −$240 | $500 | 4 of 4 |
| Jina Reader search | $50 | −$240 | $50 | 3 of 4 |
| Linkup | $50 | −$240 | $500 | 4 of 4 |
| Perplexity Search API | $50 | −$240 | $500 | 4 of 4 |
| You.com | $50 | −$240 | $500 | 4 of 4 |
| Tavily | $78 | +$96 | $500 | 1 of 4 |
| Firecrawl search | $94 | +$288 | $349 | 2 of 4 |
| SerpApi Google results | $150 | +$960 | $725 | 1 of 4 |
Cheapest published option a month in each API's default search type, before VAT and free credits; a minus sign means cheaper than Exa. "Cheaper in" counts the volumes (1,000, 10,000, 100,000 and 1,000,000 searches a month) where it costs less than Exa.
Free alternatives to Exa
| API | Free allowance | Searches | Renews |
|---|---|---|---|
| Linkup | $20 of credit a month for accounts signed up with a professional email | 4,000 | Monthly |
| Exa | $10 of credit a month, no card needed, plus a one-time $10 onboarding bonus | 1,428 | Monthly |
| Tavily | 1,000 credits a month, no card needed | 1,000 | Monthly |
| Brave Search API | $5 of credit a month; a card confirms identity but isn't charged | 1,000 | Monthly |
| Firecrawl search | 1,000 credits a month, no card needed | 500 | Monthly |
| SerpApi | 250 searches a month | 250 | Monthly |
| You.com | $100 of free credit, and 100 searches a day through its MCP server with no key | 20,000 | Once |
| Serper | 2,500 searches to try, no card needed | 2,500 | Once |
| Jina Reader search | 10 million tokens with a new API key, for non-commercial use only | 1,000 | Once |
Searches the allowance covers in the default search type. Perplexity Search API: no free allowance in the pricing we read.
What the alternatives return
- Serper: Google's results page as structured data: titles, links and snippets.
- Brave Search API: Web results (URLs, text, news, images and more), up to five extra snippets each, and LLM context.
- Jina Reader search: The top five results with their URLs and page contents as LLM-friendly text.
- Linkup: Ranked URLs with content snippets for grounding, or an answer with its sources.
- Perplexity Search API: Up to 20 ranked results (10 by default), with text extracted from each page.
- You.com: Up to 100 web and news results a call, with snippets or highlights.
- Tavily: Up to 20 results, each with snippets from the page; optionally each page's cleaned content and an LLM-written answer.
- Firecrawl search: Search results, with each result optionally scraped into page content.
- SerpApi: Google's results page as structured data: titles, links and snippets.
Exa alternatives: quick answers
What is a cheaper alternative to Exa?
For 10,000 searches a month: Serper (Google results only) $10, Brave Search API $50, Jina Reader search $50, Linkup $50, Perplexity Search API $50, You.com $50, against $70 on Exa. All 9 are cheaper at one or more of the volumes we price (1,000 to 1,000,000 a month).
Is there a free alternative to Exa?
Free every month: Linkup, $20 of credit a month for accounts signed up with a professional email (4,000 searches); Tavily, 1,000 credits a month, no card needed (1,000 searches); Brave Search API, $5 of credit a month; a card confirms identity but isn't charged (1,000 searches); Firecrawl search, 1,000 credits a month, no card needed (500 searches); SerpApi, 250 searches a month. Once, to try: You.com, $100 of free credit, and 100 searches a day through its MCP server with no key; Serper, 2,500 searches to try, no card needed; Jina Reader search, 10 million tokens with a new API key, for non-commercial use only. Exa itself gives $10 of credit a month, no card needed, plus a one-time $10 onboarding bonus.
Is there an open-source alternative to Exa?
Firecrawl's comparison of its open-source and cloud versions lists "Core scrape, crawl, map, and search APIs" as "Included" in the open-source version, which you run on your own servers. Jina's Reader: "The Reader service code is available on the Jina AI GitHub organization. The models used by Reader, including ReaderLM-v2 and jina-vlm, are licensed CC-BY-NC 4.0, which is not an open-source license."
What is the cheapest Exa alternative at 100,000 searches a month?
Jina Reader search at $50 ($0.50 per 1,000), against $700 on Exa.
Which Exa alternatives sell a cheaper search type?
Perplexity Search API's Fast Search, $1.00 per 1,000 against $5.00 for its standard.
Every search API at 10,000 searches a month
Staying? See Exa pricing. Head to head: Tavily vs Exa, Exa vs Firecrawl. Every search API at your volume: web search APIs for LLMs.
Prices checked against each platform's own pricing page on .