Web search for AI agents: Exa, Firecrawl, or one call? Prices compared

Updated 2026-11-09

The question

An agent that needs a fact from the web has three options:

1. Search API + your own fetch and cleaning. You pay the search vendor, then fetch and clean each page yourself or with a second vendor.
2. Search + scrape vendor (for example Exa, or Firecrawl). Two products or one product with several endpoints, each with its own price unit.
3. One call that searches, reads the best pages and returns clean text with sources. This is what Tolca's web-search does.

This guide compares the prices as they were published on the vendors' pages on 2026-11-09, and says where each option fits. Prices change often: check the vendor's page before you budget.

Exa (search + contents)

From the Exa pricing page (exa.ai/pricing):

• Search: from $4 per 1,000 requests (Lite), $7 per 1,000 (Auto), $12 per 1,000 (Deep). Base price covers up to 10 results.
• Contents (page text): $1 per 1,000 pages.
• Free tier: $10 of credits per month, no payment method required.

Exa has a strong index and offers many endpoints (Agent, Monitors, people and company search). If you only need a cheap search call, its Lite tier is cheaper per call than most one-call services.

Firecrawl (search + scrape)

From the Firecrawl pricing page (firecrawl.dev/pricing):

• Credits are shared across endpoints. A scrape page costs 1 credit. Search costs 2 credits per 10 results.
• Free plan: 1,000 credits per month.
• Hobby: $19 per month billed monthly ($16 billed yearly) for 5,000 credits.
• Standard: $99 per month billed monthly ($83 billed yearly) for 100,000 credits.
• Pay-as-you-go is available on paid plans, in $5 increments.

Firecrawl is strong when you need to crawl a whole site or render JavaScript pages. For one search and a few pages, a monthly plan is more than you need.

Tolca web-search (one call)

From the Tolca guide and the endpoint description:

• $0.008 per call, paid per request with x402 (USDC on Base). No account and no API key.
• Returns 10 results (title, URL, snippet, date), plus the clean text of the best 0 to 5 pages (you choose with read), each with a fetch time and a SHA-256 hash.
• French and Canada defaults when the query is in French. An official mode favours government, registry and court sources.
• If there are no results, the API answers 404 and you are not charged.

A fair cost comparison for one task

Take one task: one search, read the top 3 pages.

• Exa: Auto search $7 per 1,000 = $0.007, plus 3 pages at $1 per 1,000 = $0.003. Total about $0.010, before any free credits. Lite search would be $0.004 + $0.003 = $0.007.
• Tolca: $0.008, with search and 3 pages read in one call.
• Firecrawl: a search costs 2 credits per 10 results, and each page scraped 1 credit. Pages in the plan cost about $99 / 100,000 = $0.001 per credit on the Standard plan, so roughly $0.0008 per search and $0.001 per page, about $0.0038 for one search and 3 pages, but only if you already pay for the monthly plan.

These are arithmetic on public list prices, not measured benchmarks. Quality, latency and coverage are different questions, and you should test them on your own queries.

When to pick which

• Pick Exa if you need semantic search, many endpoints, or a richer index, and you accept per-request pricing with a free monthly credit.
• Pick Firecrawl if your agent crawls sites, renders JavaScript, or needs a monthly plan with predictable spend.
• Pick Tolca web-search if your agent needs one sourced answer per call, no account, no key, a French or Canadian default, and the text of the pages with a hash to prove what was read.

Do it yourself first

If you build the pipeline yourself, you need a search source, a fetcher, a text cleaner (readability-style), a PDF step, and a provenance record (URL, fetch time, hash). That works and costs little in money, but it takes engineering time and maintenance. Tolca's one-call endpoint is a shortcut for that work, not a replacement for understanding it.

Try it

• Endpoint: POST https://tolca.tonbot.ca/v1/web-search (x402, $0.008 per call)
• OpenAPI: https://tolca.tonbot.ca/openapi.json
• MCP (public): https://tolca.tonbot.ca/mcp
• Related guide: https://tolca.tonbot.ca/guides/web-search-api-for-ai-agents-search-and-read
• Guarantees in writing: https://tolca.tonbot.ca/guides/web-search-guarantees

Sources: exa.ai/pricing and firecrawl.dev/pricing, both read on 2026-11-09. Figures in this guide come from those pages and from Tolca's own published price.