Exa
Embeddings-based search API with a news filter and page contents in one call
What is Exa?
Exa Labs started in San Francisco in 2021 as Metaphor, founded by Will Bryk and Jeff Wang, and raised an $85 million Series B led by Benchmark in September 2025. It runs its own web index searched by meaning, so a query like "startups cutting cloud costs" can match articles that never use those words. Set the category to news and ask for contents, and one request returns cleaned text you can drop into a prompt. As of 2026 search costs $7 per 1,000 requests with contents for the top 10 results included, and new accounts start with $20 of credit. SDKs cover Python and TypeScript, and an official MCP server plugs it into agent tools. It is a search engine at heart, so expect weaker coverage of small regional outlets and fuzzier publication dates than a dedicated news API gives.
Typical uses: AI & LLM apps, Research & academia. What sets it apart: Search by meaning with page text returned in the same request.
What does the Exa API include?
| Capability |
|---|
| Full article text |
| Web search index |
| LLM/agent tooling |
Exa pricing
Short answer: the pricing model is pay per request; free monthly credit. Entry price: $7 per 1,000 searches.
| Access model | What it means |
|---|---|
| Free tier | Permanent free allowance, usually with request, history or commercial-use limits |
| Pay-as-you-go | Billed per request or credit, with no monthly minimum |
| Enterprise contract | Negotiated licence covering volume, rights and SLA |
Exa pros and cons
| Advantages | Things to consider |
|---|---|
| +Finds relevant coverage that keyword queries miss | -No source taxonomy, sentiment or story clusters |
| +Contents come with results, so there is no second fetch-and-parse step | -Publication dates come from crawl metadata and can be off |
| +An MCP server and Python and TypeScript SDKs are official | -Monitoring thousands of queries a day gets expensive |
| +Pay per request with no monthly minimum |
Exa vs alternatives
How Exa compares to the other top News APIs.
| API | Best for | Key difference | Rating | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NewsCatcher | Developers who want clean, deduplicated news without writing... | Summaries, story clusters, entities and geotags arrive in the response, so the processing code you would otherwise write is already done | 4.7 | Full comparison |
| NewsData.io | Developers who want a working news call within... | A free allowance that refills daily, with country and language filters on every plan | 4.6 | Full comparison |
| Perigon | Indie developers and startups wanting enriched data at... | Entity, topic and cluster data from the $25 plan up, with all tiers priced publicly | 4.5 | Full comparison |
| NewsAPI.ai (Event Registry) | Developers building multilingual event or research tools. | Event records that join coverage of one story across languages | 4.3 | Full comparison |
| GNews | Small commercial apps needing a cheap, simple news... | Commercial rights and full article content for under €50 a month | 4.3 | Full comparison |
| Webz.io | Data engineers backfilling years of news for datasets. | History back to 2008 and the widest claimed source count here | 4.2 | Full comparison |
| Tavily | Agent builders adding a news tool in a... | Built-in LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations that return prompt-ready text | 4.1 | Full comparison |
| World News API | Location-aware apps on a small budget. | Latitude, longitude and radius filters from the $39 plan, plus a URL text extractor | 4.1 | Full comparison |
| NewsAPI.org | Learning projects and prototypes that follow existing tutorials. | The largest pile of tutorials, wrappers and answered questions of any news API | 4.0 | Full comparison |
| SerpApi Google News | Developers who need exactly what Google News ranks. | Google News rankings and story groupings as structured JSON | 4.0 | Full comparison |
| GDELT Project | Zero-budget data projects and research prototypes. | No key, no fee and global coverage refreshed every 15 minutes | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| Brave Search API | Developers replacing Bing News Search with an independent... | Results from its own crawler, independent of Google and Bing | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| Serper Google News | Agent prototypes needing cheap Google News lookups. | About $1 per 1,000 Google queries on the entry pack, by third-party figures | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| Marketaux | Fintech developers needing ticker-tagged news cheaply. | Entity-level sentiment on every article, free plan included | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| Alpha Vantage News & Sentiment | Hobby quants wanting news sentiment beside price data. | Ticker and topic sentiment scores from the same key as market data | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Massive (ex-Polygon.io) News | Trading-app developers already using Polygon or Massive data. | Per-ticker sentiment with a written reason, included in stock data plans | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Mediastack | Low-traffic sites needing a cheap commercial headline feed. | Commercial use and historical news from $24.99 a month | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Guardian Open Platform | Students and researchers needing free full-text articles. | Free full article bodies from a major newspaper, with editorial tags | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Diffbot | Developers collecting news from a fixed list of... | Parser-free extraction from any article URL, linked to a Knowledge Graph | 3.7 | Full comparison |
| Finnhub | Personal fintech projects needing news and prices from... | A 60-calls-a-minute free key covering company news and market data | 3.7 | Full comparison |
| DataForSEO Google News | High-volume Google News rank tracking on a budget. | About $0.60 per 1,000 Google News result pages in the Standard queue | 3.7 | Full comparison |
| TheNewsAPI | Personal dashboards needing a cheap general feed. | Possibly the lowest paid entry price here, if third-party pricing is current | 3.6 | Full comparison |
| NYT Developer APIs | Students and historians working with Times metadata. | Searchable headlines and abstracts for every Times issue since 1851 | 3.5 | Full comparison |
| Benzinga | Trading platforms needing a licensed market newswire. | Original market headlines with ratings and earnings events in one feed | 3.5 | Full comparison |
| Quantexa News API (Aylien) | Teams maintaining an existing Aylien integration. | Aylien's fine-grained entity and category tagging | 3.4 | Full comparison |
| APITube | Developers comparing coverage in a side-by-side trial. | Sentiment and entity filters offered on lower tiers | 3.4 | Full comparison |
| Currents API | Coursework and hackathons needing a free feed. | A free tier that tutorials and roundups often recommend | 3.3 | Full comparison |
Exa FAQ
What is Exa?
Embeddings-based search API with a news filter and page contents in one call
How much does Exa charge?
Pricing model: pay per request; free monthly credit. The cheapest paid access listed is $7 per 1,000 searches. Free access: yes, with limits.
Which formats and SDKs does Exa support?
Exa offers REST API, JSON, Python SDK, Node.js SDK, MCP server.
Is Exa right for enterprise?
Yes, Exa sells enterprise contracts. Main caveat: No source taxonomy, sentiment or story clusters.
What are the best Exa alternatives?
The best alternatives to Exa depend on your use case. Top options are:
- NewsCatcher: summaries, story clusters, entities and geotags arrive in the response, so the processing code you would otherwise write is already done
- NewsData.io: a free allowance that refills daily, with country and language filters on every plan
- Perigon: entity, topic and cluster data from the $25 plan up, with all tiers priced publicly
Compare Exa with other News APIs
Verify all details directly with Exa before making a decision.