Growth Agency CTO Complains Exa Search API is Eating Profits
Consistent_Donut4039 · reddit · 2026-07-07
The CTO of a 30-person growth agency shared their experience building an automated lead enrichment pipeline with Exa. By inputting a list of target companies, the pipeline automatically scrapes news, hiring signals, and funding updates to generate briefs, replacing about 30% of manual research time. However, the execution is great, but costs are spiraling out of control.
At a scale of 22 active clients with about 1,500 companies per client weekly, the costs are: Search ($7/1k calls) at $924/week, Contents ($1/1k pages) at $165/week, and Deep Search ($12/1k calls) at $99/week. This totals roughly $4,800 monthly just for search infrastructure, severely eroding profits. The author is asking for more cost-effective alternatives.
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