Social Fetch vs Exa
Exa searches the web with semantic and neural retrieval — people, companies, code, and general queries with contents included on search. Social Fetch looks up social network entities you already identified. Both show up in AI stacks; only one returns a TikTok followerCount field.
- Primary job
- Structured social media lookupsNeural / semantic web search for AI
- Pricing (headline)
- From $1.35 per 1,000 social lookups$7 per 1,000 searches (up to 10 results + contents)
- Free tier
- 100 credits, never expireGenerous free credits / monthly allowance (see Exa pricing)
Teams running monitoring, research, and enrichment pipelines
Why Social Fetch
Why teams switch from Exa.
What changes when your social lookups move to one REST API.
One API for 25 platforms
TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, X and more behind one key and one schema — no separate Exa setup per network.
Pricing you can reason about
One completed lookup, one price. Failed lookups aren't billed, so you know how far a balance goes.
JSON in the same request
Fetched live when you ask and returned in the response — ~3.2s on average, no job to poll.
No scraper maintenance
We handle proxies, browser changes, and platform breakages.
Built for production jobs
Run concurrent workloads with explicit statuses and request IDs.
Pay as you go, or save monthly
Start with 100 free credits and no subscription. Pay-as-you-go credits never expire; running lookups every month? A monthly plan gets you lower per-credit rates.
What teams build with Social Fetch
Monitoring, enrichment, research and content workflows — the jobs teams run on Exa, as plain API calls.
Monitor brands and competitors
Watch accounts on a schedule and get a signed webhook when something new posts.
Find and vet creators
Check reach and engagement before you reach out.
Turn video into searchable text
Transcribe and index video and audio content so you can find the exact moment you need.
Track public communities
Follow the subreddits, groups, and channels where your audience talks.
Search requests vs social operations
Exa: Search $7/1k (≤10 results with text), Deep Search $12, Contents $1/1k pages. Social Fetch Scale: $1.64/1k social lookups. A thousand Exa searches ≠ a thousand Instagram profiles.
1,000 search requests
- Social Fetch
- N/A
- Exa
- $7 (standard Search, ≤10 results)
1,000 social profile lookups
- Social Fetch
- ~$1.64
- Exa
- N/A as structured social
Full page contents add-on
- Social Fetch
- Web fetch is a separate social-adjacent utility
- Exa
- $1 per 1,000 pages on Contents endpoint
Billing style
- Social Fetch
- Prepaid packs; PAYG never expires
- Exa
- Usage-based API credits
| Scenario | Social Fetch | Exa |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 search requests | N/A | $7 (standard Search, ≤10 results) |
| 1,000 social profile lookups | ~$1.64 | N/A as structured social |
| Full page contents add-on | Web fetch is a separate social-adjacent utility | $1 per 1,000 pages on Contents endpoint |
| Billing style | Prepaid packs; PAYG never expires | Usage-based API credits |
Exa prices checked 21 July 2026. How we priced this, with sources
Pricing
Social data, priced simply.
Start with 100 free credits. Monthly plans give you predictable volume and lower per-request rates.
Starter
1,000credits
$14.00 per 1k · $0.0140 per request
- Prove one workflow before you buy more
- All 25 platforms on one API key
Growth
25,000credits
$2.36 per 1k · $0.00236 per request
- For a project or one-off batch job
- Better per-credit rate than the Starter pack
Scale
230,000credits
$1.64 per 1k · $0.00164 per request
- For a large one-time job
- Best pack rate of the three — includes bonus credits
Need 1M+ credits, invoicing, or volume rates? Talk to us
Trust signals
DevHunt
Product Hunt
Uneed
Social Fetch vs Exa, side by side.
How each product expects you to integrate, what you're billed for, and which capabilities come as standard.
Primary job
- Social Fetch
- Structured social media lookups
- Exa
- Neural / semantic web search for AI
Pricing (headline)
- Social Fetch
- From $1.35 per 1,000 social lookups
- Exa
- $7 per 1,000 searches (up to 10 results + contents)
Free tier
- Social Fetch
- 100 credits, never expire
- Exa
- Generous free credits / monthly allowance (see Exa pricing)
People / company search on the web
- Social Fetch
- Not the product
- Exa
- Core strength
TikTok profile JSON
- Social Fetch
- Dedicated route + normalized schema
- Exa
- Search results — not a social API
Social catalog
- Social Fetch
- 264 ops / 25 platforms
- Exa
- Web index — category mismatch
| Row | Social Fetch | Exa |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Structured social media lookups | Neural / semantic web search for AI |
| Pricing (headline) | From $1.35 per 1,000 social lookups | $7 per 1,000 searches (up to 10 results + contents) |
| Free tier | 100 credits, never expire | Generous free credits / monthly allowance (see Exa pricing) |
| People / company search on the web | Not the product | Core strength |
| TikTok profile JSON | Dedicated route + normalized schema | Search results — not a social API |
| Social catalog | 264 ops / 25 platforms | Web index — category mismatch |
| Capability | Social Fetch | Exa |
|---|---|---|
| Synchronous REST JSON (no actor run polling) | ||
| One API key for all platforms | ||
| Unified schema across platforms | ||
| Public OpenAPI specification | ||
| Official TypeScript SDK | ||
| Interactive API playground | ||
| TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, X in one vendor | ||
| Pay-as-you-go without required monthly subscription | ||
| PAYG credits never expire | ||
| Web fetch (markdown/HTML) in same product | ||
| Scheduled account / feed monitors | ||
| Signed webhooks when watched accounts post |
Customers
Teams building on Social Fetch.
“Our TikTok and Instagram scrapers broke constantly. Social Fetch took us off that rotation — we ship product again.”
“Transcripts at volume from one endpoint. No broken scrapers for our small team to maintain.”
“Live profile data on every request. We never flag accounts from a stale cache.”
“Heavy concurrent load, no rate limits to negotiate. The rare API I haven't wrapped in retries.”
Which one should you pick?
If the Exa list sounds like you, Exa is probably the better buy — and that's fine.
Pick Social Fetch if…
- Live social profiles, posts, comments, transcripts as JSON
- Dashboards and CRM enrichment keyed by social handles
- One envelope across many social networks
Pick Exa if…
- Semantic web search, people/company discovery, code or research queries
- RAG pipelines that need ranked contents and highlights
- Agent frameworks already integrated with Exa's SDKs
Social Fetch vs Exa: common questions
Migration, billing surprises, and what changes when you add a second platform.
Is Exa cheaper than Social Fetch?
For web search, Exa's $7/1k is the relevant number. For social profile lookups, Social Fetch's $1.64/1k is the relevant number. They are not interchangeable SKUs.
Can Exa return TikTok follower counts reliably?
Only insofar as some web page mentions them. That is not the same as a live profile lookup with typed fields and lookupStatus.
Should my agent include both tools?
Usually yes if it both researches the web and enriches social accounts. Route by argument type: query → Exa; handle/URL → Social Fetch.
The detailed Social Fetch vs Exa comparisonHow Exa works, where the costs come from, and when to keep it.
Exa finds; Social Fetch fetches known social entities
Exa shines when the user (or agent) has a fuzzy need: find similar companies, research a person across the web, pull code or paper context. Contents and highlights are tuned for RAG token budgets. Deep Search trades latency and dollars for harder queries.
Social Fetch shines when the identifier is already known: a handle, a post URL, a channel ID. The hard part is not retrieval ranking — it is keeping platform extraction working and returning a stable schema.
Pointing Exa at "instagram.com/foo" and parsing the snippet is a prototype trick, not a production social integration.
Wire the right tool to the right argument type
In an MCP or tool-calling setup, give the model Exa (or Tavily) when the argument is a natural-language query. Give it Social Fetch when the argument is a social URL or handle. Mixing them — Exa for everything — recreates the HTML-parsing tax Firecrawl users hit on social pages.
Exa's people and company search can still help discovery before you have a handle. Once you do, hand off to Social Fetch for live metrics.
Seven dollars per thousand is fine — for search
Exa at $7/1k is priced for search quality, not for competing with $1.64 social lookups. Teams that try to "save money" by using only Exa for creator dashboards usually spend more on LLM tokens cleaning messy snippets than they would on a social API — and still lack typed fields for sorting and filtering.
Conversely, do not buy Social Fetch hoping it replaces Exa's neural search. Different index, different product.
Bottom line: Neural search vs social entity API
Exa is for finding and reading the web. Social Fetch is for structured social entities you already named. Keep Exa in the research tool slot. Keep Social Fetch in the social data tool slot. Ranking them on a single price-per-1k chart without separating those jobs misleads procurement.
Methodology and sourcesHow we priced each scenario, and where every Exa figure comes from. Checked 21 July 2026.
Sources
Exa pricing from exa.ai/pricing (July 2026). Free credit promotions change; verify the current signup and monthly free allotment on Exa's site before modeling a prototype budget.
Exa is a trademark of its owner. Social Fetch is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Exa. Details about Exa come from public sources checked on 21 July 2026.
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