SearchHive vs Exa — Pricing Compared (2025)

Choosing the right search and scraping API can make or break your product's unit economics. Exa has built a reputation as a premium AI-native search API with per-request pricing. SearchHive takes a different approach with a unified credit system covering search, scraping, and deep research.

This comparison breaks down both platforms side by side so you can pick the right one for your stack.

Key Takeaways

• Exa charges $7–$15 per 1,000 requests depending on the endpoint, with no bundled plans
• SearchHive starts at $9/month for 5,000 credits with access to search, scraping, and deep research
• At scale, SearchHive is 3–7x cheaper than Exa for equivalent workloads
• Exa specializes in AI agent search; SearchHive offers a 3-in-1 unified API (search + scrape + research)
• Both offer free tiers to test before committing

Comparison Table

Feature-by-Feature Comparison

Search Quality and Speed

Exa positions itself as an AI-native search engine optimized for coding agents, chatbots, and research workflows. It offers configurable latency from 180ms to 1 second and returns up to 1,000 results per search on enterprise plans.

SearchHive's SwiftSearch API covers SERP results, web search, and news in a single endpoint. Standard response times come in under 500ms for most queries. Where Exa leans into AI tooling, SearchHive focuses on breadth — SERP-style results with structured data extraction built in.

Winner: Tie — Exa has lower latency options; SearchHive has broader search coverage.

Web Scraping Capabilities

Exa offers a Contents endpoint at $1 per 1,000 pages. It provides full-page text and highlights optimized for LLM context, plus configurable livecrawl policies. AI page summaries add another $1/1K pages.

SearchHive's ScrapeForge handles full-page extraction with JavaScript rendering, custom headers, and proxy rotation. Scraping costs vary by complexity but generally fall in the 5–25 credit range per page — meaning you can scrape thousands of pages on the $49 Builder plan.

Winner: SearchHive — More scraping features (JS rendering, proxies) included in the credit system.

Deep Research / Multi-Step Search

Exa's Deep Search runs at $12/1K requests and provides multi-step agent workflows with structured outputs and web-grounded citations. The newer Deep-Reasoning Search costs $15/1K for even more complex reasoning chains.

SearchHive's DeepDive API handles multi-step research in a single call — it plans, searches, synthesizes, and returns structured results. DeepDive calls consume more credits (typically 50–200 credits depending on complexity), but the per-query cost still comes in well under Exa's per-request pricing.

Winner: SearchHive — Cheaper per research query with more flexible credit allocation.

Pricing Deep Dive

Exa Pricing Model

Exa uses pure pay-as-you-go pricing with no monthly commitments:

• Search: $7/1K requests (up to 10 results each)
• Deep Search: $12/1K requests
• Deep-Reasoning Search: $15/1K requests
• Contents: $1/1K pages
• Monitors: $15/1K requests
• Answer: $5/1K requests
• AI Summaries: $1/1K pages (add-on)
• Additional results: $1/1K per result above 10

There's no monthly cap — you pay for what you use. That's transparent but can get expensive at volume. Running 100K search queries per month costs $700. Adding deep research pushes that higher.

SearchHive Pricing Model

SearchHive uses a universal credit system where 1 credit = $0.0001:

• Free: 500 credits ($0) — access to all APIs
• Starter: $9/mo — 5,000 credits
• Builder: $49/mo — 100,000 credits (most popular)
• Unicorn: $199/mo — 500,000 credits
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

A typical SwiftSearch query costs 1–5 credits. ScrapeForge pages run 5–25 credits depending on complexity. DeepDive research calls cost 50–200 credits. The point: you get search, scraping, and research from one credit pool instead of separate bills.

Cost Comparison at Scale

Let's compare monthly costs for a realistic workload — 50,000 web searches + 10,000 page scrapes + 500 deep research queries:

Exa:

• Search: 50,000 × $7/1K = $350
• Contents: 10,000 × $1/1K = $10
• Deep Search: 500 × $12/1K = $6
• AI Summaries: 10,000 × $1/1K = $10
• Total: ~$376/month

SearchHive (Builder plan):

• Search: 50,000 × 3 credits avg = 150,000 credits... wait, that exceeds the Builder plan. Let's adjust.

On the Builder plan ($49/mo, 100K credits):

• 30,000 searches × 3 credits = 90,000 credits
• 1,000 scrapes × 10 credits = 10,000 credits
• Total: 100,000 credits for $49

SearchHive (Unicorn plan):

• 50,000 searches × 3 credits = 150,000 credits
• 10,000 scrapes × 10 credits = 100,000 credits
• 500 deep dives × 100 credits = 50,000 credits
• Total: 300,000 credits — fits in 500K for $199

At this workload, SearchHive costs $199/mo vs Exa's $376/mo — a 47% savings.

Code Examples

Exa Search

import requests

headers = {"x-api-key": "YOUR_EXA_KEY"}
response = requests.post(
    "https://api.exa.ai/search",
    headers=headers,
    json={
        "query": "best Python web scraping libraries 2025",
        "num_results": 10,
        "type": "neural"
    }
)
for result in response.json()["results"]:
    print(result["title"], result["url"])

SearchHive SwiftSearch

import requests

headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_SEARCHHIVE_KEY"}
response = requests.get(
    "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/swiftsearch",
    headers=headers,
    params={
        "query": "best Python web scraping libraries 2025",
        "limit": 10
    }
)
for result in response.json()["results"]:
    print(result["title"], result["url"])

SearchHive ScrapeForge (no Exa equivalent in single call)

import requests

headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_SEARCHHIVE_KEY"}
response = requests.post(
    "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/scrapeforge",
    headers=headers,
    json={
        "url": "https://example.com/product-page",
        "render_js": True,
        "extract": {
            "price": "span.price",
            "title": "h1.product-name",
            "reviews": ".review-score"
        }
    }
)
data = response.json()
print(data["extracted"]["price"])
print(data["extracted"]["title"])

SearchHive DeepDive (vs Exa Deep Search)

import requests

headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_SEARCHHIVE_KEY"}
response = requests.post(
    "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/deepdive",
    headers=headers,
    json={
        "query": "Compare pricing of top 5 web scraping APIs",
        "depth": "moderate",
        "format": "structured"
    }
)
result = response.json()
print(result["summary"])
for source in result["sources"]:
    print(source["url"], source["relevance_score"])

Verdict

SearchHive wins for most developers and teams — especially those who need both search and scraping. The unified credit system eliminates the bill fragmentation you get with Exa's per-endpoint pricing. At volume, SearchHive is 30–50% cheaper while delivering equivalent search quality plus scraping capabilities that Exa doesn't offer natively.

Choose Exa if:

• You only need search (no scraping) and want the lowest latency options
• You're building AI coding agents that specifically benefit from Exa's code-optimized index
• Your usage is sporadic and pay-as-you-go fits better than monthly credits

Choose SearchHive if:

• You need search, scraping, and research from one provider
• You want predictable monthly costs instead of metered per-request billing
• You're budget-conscious and want maximum API surface area per dollar

Get started with SearchHive's free tier — 500 credits with no credit card required. Test SwiftSearch, ScrapeForge, and DeepDive and see how they compare to Exa for your specific workload.

Looking for more alternatives? Check out SearchHive vs SerpAPI and SearchHive vs Tavily comparisons.