Metaphor vs Tavily
Both are search APIs built for AI agents, not humans. Metaphor (now Exa) owns its index and charges about $7 per 1,000 search requests with $10 in free monthly credits. Tavily aggregates live sources and bills in credits: 1,000 free credits/month, paid plans from $30/month (4,000 credits), pay-as-you-go at $0.008/credit. Exa's pitch is neural retrieval and clean excerpts; Tavily's is fast RAG-ready results with extract/crawl endpoints. No measured quality winner; pricing models differ enough that the cheaper one depends on your query mix.
| Decision point | Exa (formerly Metaphor) | Tavily |
|---|---|---|
| Best suited to | Engineering teams building coding agents, research copilots, RAG pipelines or sales-enrichment flows that need programmatic, citation-ready web access with clean excerpts. | Developers building AI agents and RAG pipelines who want search plus page extraction from one vendor, with framework integrations and a no-card free tier for prototyping. |
| Plans and cost | Starter: free, with $10 in credits every month plus a $10 onboarding bonus and no payment method required. Developer: pay as you go. Enterprise: custom. Endpoint prices: Lite search from $4 per 1,000 requests, Auto search $7, Deep search $12, Contents $1 per 1,000 pages, Monitors $15 per 1,000 requests, Answer from $5. Currency is not explicitly labeled. | Free: 1,000 credits/month; Project $30/month (4,000 credits); Bootstrap $100/month; Startup $220/month; Growth $500/month; pay-as-you-go $0.008/credit. Prices as of Oct 2026. |
| Limitations | Pricing is per request and endpoint, and usage is metered by calls, pages and agent runs; check the endpoint table for the call type you use. Exa is a search API for agents and applications, not a consumer chat product. | A basic search costs 1 credit, advanced costs 2, and Research can burn up to 250 credits per request — one pro research call can eat a quarter of the free monthly allocation. The Nebius acquisition ma |
Use the same input
Prototype a research agent making 5,000 basic searches/month and compute the monthly bill on each, including one deep-research call per day.
What a successful result must preserve
The API must return structured, citation-ready results for an agent at under $50/month for 5k queries.
Evidence and test status
Pricing and feature comparison based on publicly available information. Plan prices, limits and feature descriptions below come from the vendors' official pricing pages and published third-party pricing checks, re-checked October 2026. We did not run a scored hands-on test; no quality ranking is claimed.
- Exa (formerly Metaphor) — Official Exa homepage (formerly Metaphor) ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-26), Official Exa endpoint pricing ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-26), Former Metaphor homepage, redirects to exa.ai ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-26)
- Tavily — Tavily ↗, Tavily ↗