Exa

Exa is a search API built on its own embedding index. For sourcing, its relevant surfaces are the people category on /search (announced December 19, 2025, covering 1B+ public profiles and replacing the older linkedin category), Websets (asynchronous jobs that build lists of people, companies or papers against natural-language criteria) and the Agent API, which bills email and phone enrichment separately ($0.02 and $0.07). It is a general web retrieval system rather than a candidate database: a competing vendor argues it lacks structured title, seniority and geography filters and returns duplicates, which is a vendor claim we could not test.

On the developer surface the evidence is strong. The docs include a quickstart with Python, JavaScript and cURL, an OpenAPI spec, a changelog and an llms-style index; Python (exa-py) and JavaScript (exa-js) SDKs; a hosted MCP at mcp.exa.ai that works without an API key; and an agent skill. Pricing is published and pay-as-you-go ($4-$7 per 1,000 searches, $12-$15 for deep search, $1 per 1,000 content pages) with $10 of free credit that resets monthly and needs no card. Websets and people search have no dedicated price on the pricing page, and standard rate limits are not stated.

Exa runs a public status page (status.exa.ai) showing 99.97% for the Search API, 99.99% for Websets, 99.92% for the Agents API and 100% for MCP; third-party monitors recorded 22 incidents in 90 days (about 96.3% availability), including a roughly two-hour elevated-error event on filtered searches on May 23. SLAs exist only on enterprise contracts. No G2 or Trustpilot review corpus was found.