metasearch.sh vs Exa

Exa sells neural web search (auto, lite and deep types), page contents, answers and research, with a hosted MCP server. metasearch.sh resells Exa and other engines behind one key and one prepaid balance, at each engine's list price × 1.5.

Price

per 1,000 callsExa directExa through uscheapest engine here
Search, 10 results with text and highlights$7 per 1,000 requests, $1 per 1,000 extra results$7$10.50$0.75jina · general
Exa Deep$12 per 1,000 requests$12$18$1.50serper · deep
Exa plans
Pay as you go with no minimum; volume pricing for enterprise.
Exa free tier
$10 of credit, renewed every month.

Where Exa wins

  • If Exa is the only engine you need, going direct costs less per call.
  • $10 of free credit every month, where metasearch.sh gives a one-time sign-up credit.
  • Lite search at $4 per 1,000 and Contents at $1 per 1,000 pages, which metasearch.sh does not resell.

Where metasearch.sh wins

  • Exa's people and similar-page search on the same key, next to engines that cost a fraction of Exa for routine lookups.
  • One key and one balance for 8 engines across 12 modes: serper, exa, jina, brave, linkup, perplexity, firecrawl, xai.
  • Failed, timed-out and empty calls cost nothing; you pay for the engine that returned results.
  • Ask several engines in one call and get one list, merged by rank fusion.
  • Any page as markdown from $0.00075 with our own fetch, escalating to rendering services when a page needs a browser.
  • Live X posts through xAI, in social mode.
  • Auto routing picks the mode and says why in the response, at no charge.
  • The open-source search-cli and an MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor and VS Code, on the same key.
get your keyevery price

Sources

Also compared: Tavily · SerpApi