Anthropic API vs Exa
API for Claude — frontier models for chat, tool use, agents, and long-context reasoning
vs. AI search API for developers — neural + keyword hybrid for agents
Pricing tiers
Anthropic API
Opus 4.7 — usage
Input $5 / output $25 / cache-write $6.25 / cache-read $0.50 per 1M tokens. Batch = 50% off.
Custom
Sonnet 4.6 — usage
Input $3 / output $15 / cache-write $3.75 / cache-read $0.30 per 1M tokens. Batch = 50% off.
Custom
Haiku 4.5 — usage
Input $1 / output $5 / cache-write $1.25 / cache-read $0.10 per 1M tokens. Batch = 50% off.
Custom
Exa
Free Tier
1,000 requests/month at no cost. Access to all core products.
Free
Pay-as-you-go
Usage-based per endpoint. No monthly minimum.
$0 base (usage-based)
Startup + Education Grants
$1,000 in free credits for qualifying projects.
$0 base (usage-based)
Enterprise
Custom. High-volume, custom datasets, rate limits, SLA, dedicated support.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing opus-4-7 on Anthropic API vs free on Exa.
| Metric | Anthropic API | Exa |
|---|---|---|
| discount batch | 50 % off | — |
Features
Anthropic API · 0 features
Exa · 13 features
- Answer API — Query → direct answer with citations.
- Category Filter — Filter to news, research papers, company, github, tweet, pdf, financial report, …
- Contents API — Retrieve cleaned full-text + summaries from URLs.
- Custom Datasets (Ent) — Enterprise: private indexing of your own corpus.
- Deep Reasoning Search — Adds LLM reasoning on top of Deep Search.
- Deep Search — Multi-hop iterative search for complex queries.
- Find Similar — Given a URL, find semantically similar pages.
- Highlights — Extract most-relevant passages per result.
- Livecrawl — Fetch pages on-demand (bypass cache) for freshness-critical queries.
- MCP Server — Official Exa MCP for Claude Code / Cursor / Agents.
- Monitors — Scheduled recurring search → alerts on new results.
- Search API — Neural + keyword web search for agents. Returns ranked URLs.
- Summaries — LLM-generated page summaries.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Anthropic API | Exa |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Claude Code CLI | — |
| SDK | Go SDK, Java SDK, Python SDK, Ruby SDK, TypeScript SDK (@anthropic-ai/sdk) | exa-js, exa-py |
| REST | AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Microsoft Azure AI, REST API (Messages + Agents) | Exa REST API |
| MCP | — | Exa MCP Server |
| OTHER | — | Exa Dashboard |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Anthropic API and Exa are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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