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Exa, 35 person startup building a new search engine, raises $85M Series B (exa.ai)
16 points by jeffreyw128 on Sept 3, 2025 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments


the only thing is the pricing is confusing to me and I think I'm not dumb

how am I to understand the search, context, answer, and research pricing? do I just look at search pricing if that's all I plan to do, for now?


https://exa.ai/pricing

curious what you believe to be confusing, we'd love to make it clearer! perhaps you landed on a different page somehow?


I find it confusing too. There are a bunch of different things that influence pricing (what's "auto" vs. "fast"?) and also "results"? Does that mean if I ask for 25 results, I pay $5 per 1000 requests, and if I ask for 26 results, I pay $25 per 1000 requests? or is that based on how many results Exa returns (which depends on how much data Exa has)? I'm sure if I understood the product (as your customers do) it would make sense, but as an outsider, it's not clear to me how much I would pay for the example searches (e.g: "space companies based in the US") or the demos.

Also minor notes:

* Research link in the footer is a 404 * Changelog link in the footer is a link to the blog

edit: after reading the documentation, there are 4 search types, "auto" and "fast" are 2 options that have been combined into a single column on the pricing table. The "latency" at the bottom is a description of the "fast" and "auto" options. I think I understand it now.


Yeah this has evolved to be confusing. We are considering what to do about it


also thanks for the notes, we're fixing


this


well im sold

I just did two searches that I did the last few days with google and frustratingly got old irrelevant results

exa.ai was able to surface relevant things -- the exact stuff I needed and recent, up-to-date stuff, too.


out of curiosity, what did you search for?


terraform sns to aws firehose example -- this one is not fair kinda -- only recently were you able to do this still the first result was a blog that had exactly what I needed

and

python decorator -- this one is timeless but I wanted to see new stuff


damn, good luck guys




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