--- title: "Exa vs TheirStack: which one, and why" description: "Exa and TheirStack compared on unit cost, billing model, data returned, license and MCP support. Verified pricing, October 2026." url: https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/compare/exa-vs-theirstack updated: 2026-10-25 --- Head to head · Verified 17 to 19 Oct 2026 # Exa vs *TheirStack* ## Exa Best for agent research $4/1k searches vs ## TheirStack Best hiring and tech signal $49/mo Short answer Exa answers questions nobody has structured yet, returning clean page content a model can read. TheirStack answers one question extremely well: who is hiring for what, and what are they running. If your trigger is definable in advance, TheirStack is cheaper and cleaner. If your trigger is "something changed and I want to know what", Exa is the only option here. Side by side ## Where they actually differ Every value comes from the same record that drives the [Signal APIs](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/signal-apis) listing, so this table cannot disagree with the cards. Accented tags are data one provider returns and the other does not. | Compare | [Exa](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/signal-apis/exa-api-review) | [TheirStack](https://theirstack.com/) | | --- | --- | --- | | What it is | Web search built to be read by a model | Job postings as a buying signal, priced per company | | Entry price | $4/1k searches | $49/mo | | Unit cost | $0.0070 per auto search | $0.109 per company credit | | Billing model | Pay as you go Free tier | Credit packs Subscription Pay as you go | | Free tier | $10 of credits every month | A free trial with company and API credits, no card required | | GTM motion covered | Signal Source Enrich | Signal Source | | Data returned | Firmographics Intent and news Work email Mobile phone | Job postings Technographics Firmographics Intent and news | | MCP server | Yes https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp | Yes https://api.theirstack.com/mcp | | Interfaces | REST API MCP server n8n node | REST API MCP server Bulk or async Native in Clay n8n node | | Auth | Bearer token, or OAuth through the MCP server | Bearer token | | Rate limits | 10 search QPS free, up to 25 on pay as you go. 50 agent concurrency on both. | Published per plan, with a documented bulk search endpoint | | Coverage | Global | Global | | Compliance | SOC 2 Type II | GDPR DPA | | Best for | Best for agent research | Best hiring and tech signal | The decision ## Pick each one when ### Exa - The signal is not in anyone's database yet. - An agent is doing the research, not a query. - You want $10 of free credits a month to prototype on. ### TheirStack - Your trigger is hiring, headcount or tech stack. - You want structured rows you can filter, not prose. - Credits that roll over for 12 months suit your volume. The test that settles it Coverage claims are not comparable here, because these two do not index the same web. Take a hundred of the queries you would really run, send them through one free tier and one trial, and count the answers you could put in front of a rep without editing them. That ratio, rather than the price per call, is what you are buying. Plan by plan ## What each one costs, tier by tier Both publish a full rate card, so this comparison runs on numbers rather than on adjectives. Exa lists 3 tiers and TheirStack lists 11. Every figure is read off the vendor's own pricing page, and the pages they came from are listed at the foot of this one. | The short version | Exa | TheirStack | | --- | --- | --- | | Cheapest paid plan | Not published | 1,500 API credits, $49 | | Tiers published | 3 | 11 | | Free tier | $10 of credits every month | A free trial with company and API credits, no card required | | Unit cost at entry | $0.007 per auto search | $0.109 per company credit | The cheapest paid plan is rarely the plan you end up on, because what moves you up a tier is usually volume rather than a feature. The two rate cards below are what you are choosing between. ### Exa Exa publishes 3 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from Pay as you go to Custom. #### Starter $0 free, no card - $10 of credits every month, plus a $10 onboarding bonus - Access to every endpoint - 10 search queries per second, 50 agent concurrency - MCP server, Claude connector and ChatGPT plugin #### Developer Pay as you go per request, no commitment - The per-1,000 rates in the table above - Up to 25 search queries per second - 50 agent concurrency - SOC 2 Type II, card or bank payment #### Enterprise Custom quote - Custom search QPS and agent concurrency - For large-scale requirements ### TheirStack TheirStack publishes 11 tiers, none of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $49 to $5,500. #### 1,500 API credits $49 /mo - 1,500 jobs, or 500 companies, or any mix - $32.67 per 1,000 credits - Unused credits roll over for 12 months #### 5,000 $100 /mo - $20.00 per 1,000 credits #### 10,000 $169 /mo - $16.90 per 1,000 credits #### 20,000 $240 /mo - $12.00 per 1,000 credits #### 50,000 $400 /mo - $8.00 per 1,000 credits #### 5,000,000 $5,500 /mo - $1.10 per 1,000 credits, the floor of the ladder 5 steps between the fifth and the last are not drawn here. The cost model below reads all 11. Cost model ## What Exa and TheirStack cost at your volume Put your own volume in. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers it on each side, which is the question a rate card cannot answer and the one that decides the bill. ### Exa Publishes an entry price and no ladder above it, so the figure below is a floor rather than a forecast. Published floor **$4/1k searches** Twelve months **$48** Above that **Not published** Ask for **the rate at your volume** ### TheirStack Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill. Plan that covers it **10,000** Monthly **$169** Twelve months **$2,028** Included **10,000 credits** Your rate at this volume **$0.0169 per credit** Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices before any discount you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount. Exa publishes an entry price with no ladder above it, so the figure shown is the floor rather than your bill. Twelve months ## What a year costs at three volumes The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for. Every column moves with volume, because all of these meter usage rather than seats. | A year at | Exa | TheirStack | | --- | --- | --- | | 1,000 a month | $48 | $588 1,500 API credits | | 10,000 a month | $48 | $2,028 10,000 | | 50,000 a month | $48 | $4,800 50,000 | 2 of the 2 providers here publish enough to be put in this table. These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, so they are the number before you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount by between a fifth and a half. In practice ## How this plays out once it is running These answer different questions and the confusion between them costs teams a quarter. TheirStack answers "which companies are hiring for this role or running this technology", as structured rows you can filter and count. [Exa](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/signal-apis/exa-api-review) answers "what happened at this company recently", as clean page content a model can read. If your trigger can be written down in advance as a filter, TheirStack is cheaper, cleaner and does not hallucinate. If your trigger is a judgment call that changes per account, no structured feed will carry it and Exa is the only option here. Teams that need both usually run TheirStack for the list and Exa for the brief. Strengths ## What each one is genuinely good at Not a feature list. These are the things that make somebody keep paying after the novelty has worn off, which is a different question from what the marketing page leads with. ### Exa #### It answers questions nobody has structured yet A dataset can only return what its vendor decided to collect. Exa searches the live web and returns clean page content a model can read, which is the only option here when the trigger is something that has just happened and does not have a field. #### Ten dollars of credits every month, with every endpoint on it Plus a $10 onboarding bonus, a hosted MCP server, a Claude connector and a ChatGPT plugin, all available on the free tier. You can prototype an agent against the real API without a card or a conversation. #### Concurrency built for agents Fifty agent requests at once with 10 search queries a second free and up to 25 on pay as you go. TheirStack publishes limits per plan and is designed around batches and a documented bulk search endpoint rather than around many small parallel calls. ### TheirStack #### Structured rows you can filter, not prose you have to parse Job postings, technographics and buying intents as fields. A search gives you text whose shape varies with the query; a dataset gives you a column you can sort. For a repeatable pipeline that difference is paid in engineering rather than in credits. #### An eleven-step published ladder with a real volume discount From $49 a month for 1,500 API credits to $5,500 for 5,000,000, with the per-credit rate falling from about $0.033 to $0.0011. Nobody else in this directory publishes that many steps, and at the top it is a thirtyfold discount on the entry rate. #### Credits roll over for twelve months Unused credits stay in the account for a year. For a signal-driven motion that fires in bursts rather than evenly, that is the difference between buying for your peak and buying for your average. Limits ## Where each one falls down Every provider on this site has a case it handles badly, and the people who find out are the ones who bought it for that case. These are the ones worth knowing before you sign rather than after. ### Exa #### The answer changes with the query That is what makes search useful and what makes it a poor filter. If the same question has to return a comparable value across thousands of companies, you will end up writing the normalization that a dataset ships with, and maintaining it. #### No rollover and a balance rather than a quota The free allowance is $10 of credits a month, and what that buys depends on which endpoints you call, since a research request can cost up to $1.00 on its own. ### TheirStack #### It answers three questions and nothing else Hiring, technographics and buying intent. The moment your trigger is something else, there is no query that will get it, at any price. This is a dataset rather than a search engine and it does not degrade gracefully outside its subject. #### Two credit currencies, and the cheaper one is not the API Company credits are the app's, at $109 for 1,000 one-time, and API credits are the subscription's, from $49 for 1,500. The directory's cross-provider unit cost reads the company-credit figure, so compare on the API ladder rather than on the headline when you are buying for a pipeline. #### An MCP server, but not a free one TheirStack now publishes one at api.theirstack.com/mcp, but every tool call spends API credits at the API rate, where Exa's two default search tools need no auth at all. Both ## Using Exa and TheirStack together A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of them. On this pairing it often is not, and the arrangement below is what teams actually end up running. These do not compete so much as sit at two ends of the same job, and the arrangement that works uses both in order: TheirStack to decide which companies are worth looking at, Exa to find out what just happened at them. That ordering matters for the bill as well as the result. TheirStack narrows thousands of companies to dozens for a published per-credit rate that falls steeply with volume; running Exa searches across the unfiltered list instead is the expensive way round, because search has no volume discount of that shape. If you only buy one, let the trigger decide. A trigger you can write down in advance is a dataset purchase. A trigger that begins "something changed" is a search purchase, and no amount of structured data will cover it. Decide ## Exa or TheirStack, for you Four questions, answered from the same records as the rest of this page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no result to email yourself. Do you need work email? Are you buying one step or the whole motion? Do you need SOC 2 Type II published up front? Is there budget approved for this yet? Answer the questions above Each answer leans one way. The recommendation appears here once you have picked at least two. A tool like this can only weigh what is on the page. It does not know your segment, and the one test that does is the bake-off further down: real rows, cheapest entry on each side, spend divided by survivors. Where an answer leans on a certification or an integration, it means that vendor publishes it on the pages this directory read, which is not the same as the other one lacking it. The sources are listed at the foot of the page. Provenance ## Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it The question that arrives late and expensively is not how good the data is, it is who is allowed to hold it. These are the fields each one returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes. | Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | [Exa](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/signal-apis/exa-api-review) | Firmographics, Intent and news, Work email, Mobile phone | Global | SOC 2 Type II | Not stated | | [TheirStack](https://theirstack.com/) | Job postings, Technographics, Firmographics, Intent and news | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated | None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first. Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor, not your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs. Migration ## Moving between Exa and TheirStack Most readers of this page are already on one of these two. A swap is four hours of code and a month of watching, and the order below is the one that catches the expensive mistakes while they are still free. 01 ### Measure the thing you are about to lose Run 500 rows you already have through Exa and record the match rate, the fields that came back populated and the cost. Without that number a migration cannot be judged, because every provider looks cheaper per unit than the one you are paying for today. 02 ### Check the fields, not the field count TheirStack does not return Work email and Mobile phone, which Exa does. If anything downstream reads work email, that is a change to your pipeline and not just to your vendor. 03 ### Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order Exa authenticates with bearer token, or OAuth through the MCP server. TheirStack uses bearer token. The limits are the part that bites later. Exa rate: 10 search QPS free, up to 25 on pay as you go. 50 agent concurrency on both. TheirStack rate: Published per plan, with a documented bulk search endpoint. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second. 04 ### Run both for one billing cycle Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because credit expiry, rollover and the overage rate only show up at renewal and those are where the surprises live. 05 ### Cancel on the renewal date, not before Credits on most of these plans do not survive a downgrade. Check what happens to the balance you have already paid for, and time the switch so you are not buying the same records twice. The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new match rate against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your segment looks like a provider that is fine. What practitioners say ## What practitioners say about Exa The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written, linked to the thread, and nothing here is the only source for a figure in the tables above. ### Developers who evaluate it call it infrastructure, not a search box > I've evaluated both for safety-related AI work, and Exa was much more obviously built to be infrastructure: programmatic retrieval, extraction, structured results, semantic search, throughput controls, enterprise privacy, all that boring backend stuff. Kagi was much more consumer-facing, and its API offering is newer. [r/firefox](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1vrqsq0/firefox_and_exa_building_ai_search_around_people/) · August 2026 · 14 points Somebody who evaluated Exa against a consumer search product for real work, and the list they reach for is the list this page is built on: retrieval you call programmatically, extraction, structured results and throughput you can control. It is the clearest outside statement of what Exa is for, which is a retrieval layer underneath something else rather than a search engine a person looks at. The thread is about why Mozilla picked Exa and the commenter calls their own answer speculation, so the part worth keeping is the evaluation rather than the conclusion about who won it. ### The unit that decides a search API is requests per job, not price per request > services like SerpAPI and Tavily are too costly to be true, and has a tight upper limit of about 5k-15k requests per month. Assuming 1 request per session, it would mean we only can use the web search tool for about 15k times in a month. That simply isn't enough for an agentic system which might need to make several calls to do a single job. [r/LLMDevs](https://www.reddit.com/r/LLMDevs/comments/1kw7sb4/how_is_web_search_so_accurate_and_fast_in_llm/) · May 2025 · 4 points A plan sized on sessions is sized on the wrong unit, because an agent makes several calls to answer one question. That is the argument for reading the research endpoint tiers on this page alongside the per-search rate: one question answered thoroughly can cost a hundred times what one search does, and the bill is set by the loop rather than by the rate card. The monthly ceilings quoted here are this commenter's reading of two other vendors in 2025 and not anything this site verified. Take the shape of the complaint; the limits above are Exa's own, read from its rate card on 8 October 2026. 14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page. What practitioners say ## What practitioners say about TheirStack The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written, linked to the thread, and nothing here is the only source for a figure in the tables above. ### There is no official job-postings API, which is why this category exists > Job sites don't provide public APIs, they want that ad revenue. There use to be scripts to scrape their HTML but most no longer work. You can search github to find some now mostly abandon projects. [r/cscareerquestions](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/13iz48c/are_there_apis_for_job_searching/) · May 2023 · 12 points This is the structural reason a provider can charge for job postings at all. The boards publish no publicly usable API because the listings are their advertising inventory, so the data reaches you either through a scraper you maintain yourself or through somebody who maintains one for you. TheirStack is the second option with a rate card attached, and the rate card is what you are really comparing against your own engineering time. It is a 2023 comment and the abandoned-project problem has not improved since, which is the part to weigh. The question for your own build is not whether you can scrape a board this week but whether you want to own that maintenance the next time the markup changes. 14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page. In a stack ## Where each one sits in a working pipeline Neither of these is bought in isolation. These are the [worked stacks](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/stacks) on this site that use one or both, with the cost run end to end. [Agent-driven account research $0.09 Point an AI client at two MCP servers and have it write a researched account brief straight into the CRM. → → See the arithmetic →](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/stacks/agent-research) [Hiring signal to outbound $0.13 A company hiring three SDRs has already decided to spend. Turn that job posting into a sequenced contact inside a day. → → → See the arithmetic →](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/stacks/hiring-signal) If neither fits ## The wider field for both A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of these two. Often it is not, and the reason you are comparing them at all points somewhere else entirely: [Exa alternatives](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/alternatives/exa-alternatives) both start from the reason people leave. [Exa alternatives 3 Search designed to be read by a model. The reasons to leave are price per search and the shape of the index. See the alternatives →](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/alternatives/exa-alternatives) [Everything in Signal 9 The full category these two sit in, filtered by data returned, billing model and entry price. Browse the category →](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/signal-apis) Keep comparing ## Related comparisons The 26 providers behind every pairing here are in the [main listing](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis). Pairings that share a side with this one: [Exa vs Tavily](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/compare/exa-vs-tavily). Every comparison in the directory is on the [compare hub](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/compare). [vs Exa vs Tavily Two search APIs built for agents, priced within a tenth of a cent of each other. Compare them →](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/compare/exa-vs-tavily) [vs Apollo API vs Clay One key for the whole motion against a router sitting in front of 150 vendors. Compare them →](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/compare/apollo-vs-clay) [vs Apollo API vs People Data Labs A go-to-market license at two cents a credit against a license written for redistribution. Compare them →](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/compare/apollo-vs-people-data-labs) [See all 67 comparisons](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/compare) ## Comparison pages end at the rate card. *Your list does not.* We run the bake-off on your actual data, pick the provider order, and build the pipeline behind it: waterfall routing, credit ceilings and the write-back that puts a verified contact in front of a rep the same day. [Book a call](https://book.frontal.so) [See the stacks](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/stacks) Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account. FAQ ## Exa and TheirStack, answered Read from the same records that drive the table above. **Is Exa or TheirStack cheaper?** On the entry plan it is Exa, $4/1k searches against TheirStack at $49/mo. Per unit it is $0.007 per auto search against $0.109 per company credit, which is the figure that decides it at volume. **Can I try Exa and TheirStack for free?** Exa: $10 of credits every month. TheirStack: A free trial with company and API credits, no card required. **What are the rate limits on Exa and TheirStack?** Exa: 10 search QPS free, up to 25 on pay as you go. 50 agent concurrency on both. TheirStack: Published per plan, with a documented bulk search endpoint. **Do Exa and TheirStack both have MCP servers?** Both do. Exa: https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp. TheirStack: https://api.theirstack.com/mcp. **Which is better, Exa or TheirStack?** Exa answers questions nobody has structured yet, returning clean page content a model can read. TheirStack answers one question extremely well: who is hiring for what, and what are they running. If your trigger is definable in advance, TheirStack is cheaper and cleaner. **What are the downsides of Exa and TheirStack?** Measured against each other rather than in general. Exa: none of the structural gaps in this answer; the limits section carries its operational ones. TheirStack: there is no free tier, only a trial, so test your own list inside its limits before paying. **Can you use Exa and TheirStack together?** These do not compete so much as sit at two ends of the same job, and the arrangement that works uses both in order: TheirStack to decide which companies are worth looking at, Exa to find out what just happened at them. **Can I migrate from Exa to TheirStack without losing data?** Not without losing a field. TheirStack does not return work email and mobile phone, which Exa does, so anything downstream that reads it has to change. Either way, measure your match rate on 500 rows before you switch, because that number is the one you cannot recover afterwards. Published by ## [Frontal](https://frontal.so/) Frontal is the go-to-market partner for B2B tech companies past product-market fit. It publishes this directory. Every price, tier requirement and rate limit on this page was read from the vendor's own pricing page, developer documentation or knowledge base on the date below. Nothing on it is restated from a press release or a third-party listing. Where a vendor publishes no public figure, this page says so rather than estimating. [How we checked](https://frontal.so/gtm-apis#method). Reviewed by [Kenny Damian](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenny-damian-90aba221a/) Co-founder & Head of GTM, Frontal **Verified** 17 to 19 Oct 2026 **Sources** 5 vendor documents Read from - [exa.ai/pricing](https://exa.ai/pricing) - [docs.exa.ai/reference](https://docs.exa.ai/reference/getting-started) - [docs.exa.ai](https://docs.exa.ai/) - [theirstack.com/en](https://theirstack.com/en/pricing) - [api.theirstack.com](https://api.theirstack.com/)