Exa Cost and Credit Control

Overview

Control Exa spend through endpoint selection, bounded result and content work, per-key budgets, and response-derived cost evidence. Treat credentials, queries, retrieved content, generated output, spend, and destructive state as separately governed boundaries.

Prerequisites

• The target repository, environment, Exa team, product surface, and accountable owner.
• The workload's data classification, latency and freshness promise, cost ceiling, and retention policy.
• Current first-party documentation plus credentials only for a narrowly approved live check.

Current Contract

Exa uses prepaid pay-as-you-go credits unless an enterprise contract says otherwise. Search, Contents, Answer, Monitors, and Agent have different pricing; additional results, summaries, deep types, provider calls, and metered Agent effort can add cost. Higher credit balance does not raise rate limits.

Authentication

For normal REST work, inject EXA_API_KEY from an approved server-side secret manager and send it only as Authorization: Bearer to the configured first-party Exa API host. Team Management service keys, hosted MCP OAuth or enterprise managed authorization, and payment-protocol calls are separate trust models. Never print, commit, place in a URL, or expose a credential to an untrusted client.