Exa vs Tavily Pricing per 1,000 Searches

Exa and Tavily are the two search APIs most agent teams shortlist, and on the headline numbers they look interchangeable: roughly seven or eight dollars per thousand searches. They are not priced the same way underneath. Exa meters requests, results and content views separately. Tavily meters credits by search depth and ignores how many results you ask for. Which one is cheaper depends almost entirely on how your agent calls it, so this post works through the real cases rather than the list prices.

Every Exa figure below comes from its pricing page and billing documentation. Every Tavily figure comes from its pricing page and its credits documentation. We checked both firsthand, not through a comparison site, and several comparison sites are out of date on the Exa free tier in particular.

Exa vs Tavily pricing at a glance

How much does Exa cost per 1,000 searches?

Exa costs $4 per 1,000 searches on Instant and $7 on Fast or Auto, and each request includes up to 10 results with their page contents. Deep-lite and Deep cost $12 per 1,000 and Deep-Reasoning $15. There is no plan to buy: you load credits and each call draws them down, which makes a quiet month cost almost nothing.

The base price is where Exa is at its best. For an agent that fires one search per task and reads the top handful of results, Instant at $0.004 a call with highlights attached is the lowest base rate of the two. The full endpoint list, including Answer, Monitors and the Agent API, is on our Exa pricing breakdown per endpoint.

How much does Tavily cost per 1,000 searches?

Tavily costs one credit per basic search and two per advanced search. On its monthly plans a credit is $0.0075 on Project ($30 for 4,000), $0.0067 on Bootstrap ($100 for 15,000), $0.0058 on Startup ($220 for 38,000) and $0.005 on Growth ($500 for 100,000). That is $5.00 to $7.50 per 1,000 basic searches, or $8.00 on pay-as-you-go.

One setting deserves a warning. With auto_parameters switched on, Tavily may raise a search to advanced depth on its own, and the documentation says plainly that this costs 2 credits. If you budgeted for basic searches, set search_depth explicitly. The whole Tavily ladder, including extract, map and crawl, is worked out on our Tavily pricing page.

Which is cheaper when an agent asks for 20 results?

Tavily, by a wide margin. A Tavily search costs the same credit whether it returns 5 results or 20, because the bill depends only on depth. Exa prices 10 results into the base rate and bills everything above that: $1 per 1,000 for each extra result, and another $1 per 1,000 pages for the contents of each one, since contents are only free for the first ten.

Work it through for a Fast search at 20 results with one content view. The base is $7, ten extra results add $10 and their contents add $10, so 1,000 searches cost $27 instead of $7. At 20 results, Tavily basic is still $5 to $8. Agents written against one API and moved to the other often keep a high result count by default, and on Exa that single parameter can more than triple the search line.

What do 50,000 searches a month cost on each?

Here are the monthly totals for a production agent running 50,000 searches, which is a realistic figure for a support or research assistant with a few thousand users. For Tavily we used the cheapest plan combination, since pay-as-you-go charges $0.008 a credit once a plan runs out.

At 10 results Exa Instant wins, and Fast lands a little above Tavily. At 20 results Tavily costs about a quarter of Exa. On deeper search they are close, although the products differ: Exa Deep returns synthesized, cited output, while a Tavily advanced search is a better-ranked result list.

Is the Exa free tier bigger than the Tavily free tier?

Only slightly, and less than some comparison sites claim. Exa gives every team $10 in credits, reset to $10 on the first of each month, plus a one-time $10 bonus for completing onboarding. At $7 per 1,000 that is about 1,400 Fast searches or 2,500 Instant searches a month. Tavily gives 1,000 credits a month, which is 1,000 basic searches. Neither free allowance accumulates, and neither covers production traffic.

What happens when you run out of credits?

Exa returns 402 Payment Required as soon as the balance hits zero, and the same error comes back when a single API key reaches the budget you set for it. Auto recharge from the billing dashboard prevents it. Tavily stops serving requests when a plan's monthly credits are used up, unless pay-as-you-go is enabled, in which case extra credits bill at $0.008. On both, credits reset on the first of the month, not on your signup date.

Exa also sells Monitors, scheduled searches at $15 per 1,000 runs that push new results to a webhook. They are good for news and events. If what you actually need to watch is rival pricing pages, ads and site changes, a competitor monitoring tool that tracks prices and website changes is built for that job and saves you writing the diffing logic yourself.

Which is cheaper for reading pages you already know?

Neither, once volume grows. Both vendors price page reading as an add-on to search. Exa Contents is $1 per 1,000 pages for each content view, so text plus highlights is $2. Tavily Extract is 1 credit per five URLs, or $1.00 to $1.60 per 1,000 at basic depth, and Tavily Crawl bills mapping plus extraction, which comes to $1.50 to $2.40 per 1,000 pages.

That is the half of the bill where a crawl API is the cheaper tool. ClawEngine charges per page from a monthly allowance: $0.98 per 1,000 on Hobby, $0.40 on Startup and $0.27 on Scale, with markdown and typed JSON included at the same rate. Reading 250,000 known pages a month costs $250 on Exa Contents with one view and $99 on our Startup plan. The math for the whole category is on our web scraping API pricing comparison, and if you are weighing a crawl API against a search API rather than two search APIs, Firecrawl vs Tavily on pricing and credits covers that choice.

Exa or Tavily, which should you buy?

Buy Exa if your agent runs one search per task at 10 results or fewer, if the load is spiky, or if you want synthesized Deep Search answers with citations. Instant at $4 per 1,000 is hard to beat and there is no plan to outgrow. Buy Tavily if your agent pulls 15 to 20 results per query, or if volume is steady enough to fill a monthly plan, because result count never touches the bill.

We sell neither kind of search, so we come third here, and only for one job. If the same pipeline also reads whole sites you already know, such as vendor docs, catalogs or pricing pages, move that half off the search vendor. Keep search on Exa or Tavily and send the known sites to a crawl API billed per page. See ClawEngine plans and per-page rates, or compare the field on our Exa alternatives for whole-site crawling.