Tavily vs Exa: search APIs for agents
Published prices compared, with the arithmetic shown. Last checked . Prices only: we have not tested reliability, speed or output quality.
At a glance
| Tavily | Exa | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | search and serp apis | search and serp apis |
| Free tier | 1,000 API credits/month, no card. Free for students; 100k free credits advertised for startup-program applicants. | $10 of credits every month plus a $10 onboarding bonus, no payment method. |
| Entry paid price | from $30/mo | usage-based / pay as you go |
| MCP / agent support | Yes | Yes |
| Verification | full verification | full verification |
| Official pricing page | Pricing (opens official site in a new tab) | Pricing (opens official site in a new tab) |
Analysis
Both are search APIs built for LLM agents, with MCP servers and monthly free credit. They price differently: Tavily sells credits (1 per basic search, 2 per advanced), Exa sells per-request tiers by latency and depth.
Search price per 1,000 queries
- No commitment. Tavily pay-as-you-go: $8.00 (basic) or $16.00 (advanced). Exa Instant: $4.00; Fast/Auto: $7.00; Deep: $12.00 (up to 10 results each).
- With a plan. Tavily Project $30 (4,000 credits): $7.50; Growth $500 (100,000 credits): $5.00; advanced search on Growth: $10.00. Exa has no volume plan on its public page.
- Free allowance. Tavily: 1,000 credits/month = 1,000 basic searches. Exa: $10 of credits/month (plus a $10 onboarding bonus) = about 2,500 Instant searches or 1,429 Fast/Auto searches.
Contents and extraction
Exa prices page contents separately at $1.00 per 1,000 pages per content type, and its page does not say whether contents are bundled into the search price, so we do not compute a combined figure. Tavily's basic extract costs 1 credit per 5 URLs: $1.60 per 1,000 pages pay-as-you-go, $1.00 on Growth.
Which is cheaper?
At low volume with no commitment, Exa Instant ($4.00) undercuts Tavily ($8.00), and Exa Fast ($7.00) is slightly below Tavily's pay-as-you-go. At $500 a month Tavily's $5.00 beats Exa Fast but not Exa Instant. These are different products at different latency settings, so a lower price does not mean equivalent results; the right test is answer quality on your own queries.
Price ladders from the data
Effective price per unit at each published plan (monthly spend shown). Overage and assumption-based rows are excluded here; see each vendor page.
AI/agent search query
Tavily
- $8.00 Pay as you go · pay as you go
- $16.00 Pay as you go (advanced search) · pay as you go
- $7.50 Project · $30/mo
- $6.67 Bootstrap · $100/mo
- $5.79 Startup · $220/mo
- $5.00 Growth · $500/mo
- $10.00 Growth (advanced search) · $500/mo
Exa
- $4.00 Instant search · pay as you go
- $7.00 Fast / Auto search · pay as you go
- $12.00 Deep search · pay as you go
URL to LLM-ready content
Tavily
- $1.60 Pay as you go · pay as you go
- $1.00 Growth · $500/mo
Exa
- $1.00 Contents (per content type) · pay as you go
What we could not verify
- Tavily: Pricing page shows the Project slider ($30/4,000 credits); Bootstrap/Startup/Growth come from the official docs credits page.
- Exa: Not stated whether text contents are bundled in the search price; contents are priced separately, so no combined figure computed.