Exa
No written verdict yet. Here is what commenters said.
Why people recommend it
“I pay the Exa premium for semantic retrieval with far higher SNR, plus the academic index”
“try alternative search SaaS like Exa, i.e. pay per search, but use multiple because they return different sets.”
Show 3 more
“Exa also has an API for it that has worked well for me”
“see exa.ai who build generic solutions in similar space”
Caveats and dissent
“Exa's MCP server is stateless, just a REST wrapper”
“In practice, it's never worked that well for me”
Show 1 more
“We switched from Exa because Tabstack proved more reliable at retrieving content from social media urls”
Often compared with
From the makers not counted in the ranking
“we perform well on all the verticals we optimize for”
Threads where it came up
- Web Search API 3 mentions
- DeepSeek search and fetch – $0.75 per 1000 successful requests 2 mentions
- Show HN: Keenable – A different web search API for AI agents 2 mentions
- Grok 4.5 2 mentions
- Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore 2 mentions
- Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber 1 mention
Also written as exa. Data: exa.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 26
“I pay the Exa premium for semantic retrieval with far higher SNR, plus the academic index”
“Exa Fast / Auto: 2,233 searches/month”
“Exa: $7.00 per 1,000 requests”
“I use Exa and Brave search APIs separately”
“try alternative search SaaS like Exa, i.e. pay per search, but use multiple because they return different sets.”
“Exa also has an API for it that has worked well for me”
“Exa charges 7$ per 1000 queries, and charges additionally for each result that is out of top-10.”
“we are competitive in quality to exa (the market leader) but much cheaper and lower latency”
“exa.ai/about looks interesting to me”
“Exa could be great in some for example people search but is pretty bad at getting the latest content of the page”
“see exa.ai who build generic solutions in similar space”
“generate audiobooks on topics I want to understand with ElevenLabs, Exa and OpenAI”
“results got better when it modified SearXNG to work very similarly to Exa”
“Exa MCP tools generally worked better”
“Exa MCP annihilates them”
“I have had success with exa[1]”
“I've had generally good experiences with Exa”
“I am thinking about either exa or kagi, but I have no idea which one is better.”
“Exa's MCP server is stateless, just a REST wrapper”
“along with Exa via OpenRouter's integration”
“I use Exa search to help me prepare for calls”
“In practice, it's never worked that well for me”
“We switched from Exa because Tabstack proved more reliable at retrieving content from social media urls”
“exa.ai/search and perplexity”
“Firecrawl or Exa are pretty good for that”
“Uses Exa (Semantic Search) to find libraries”