Exa Endpoint Rate-limit Control

Overview

Budget Exa throughput per endpoint and distinguish caller rate limiting from vendor overload and billing exhaustion. 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

Published defaults are 10 QPS for /search, 100 QPS for /contents, and 10 QPS for /answer, while enterprise limits may differ. A 429 can reflect API-key, team, or network limits and should honor Retry-After when present. A 503 SERVICE_OVERLOADED is a separate capacity signal.

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.