Exa vs Tomba

Exa compared with Tomba

Both are API-first with flat published usage pricing and no tier ladder, and both are honest about what they charge for. Tomba is far cheaper for the specific job of turning a name and a domain into a verified email, at 0.0089 against Exa's 0.02, and ships ten SDKs across fourteen endpoints. Exa cannot be beaten on discovering which companies to target in the first place. The sensible answer for many teams is both: Exa to build the set, Tomba to resolve the addresses.

Tomba compared with Exa

Both are API-first and both publish flat usage pricing rather than tiers, but they answer different questions. Exa searches the live web semantically and enriches what it finds, at 7 dollars per thousand searches with contact enrichment at 0.02 for an email and 0.07 for a phone. Tomba queries a pre-built index of published addresses at 0.0089 per email. Exa is better when you do not yet know which companies you want; Tomba is much cheaper once you do.

Exa

Pure pay-as-you-go usage pricing with every operation individually published, no subscription, no minimum spend, no tiers, and no expiring credits.

• Free credits$0
• Search$7
• Contents and Answer$1 to $5
• Deep Search and Monitors$12 to $15
• Agent$0.012 to $1.00
• EnterpriseCustom

Compared as a contact data vendor, Exa is expensive: 1,000 emails costs 20 dollars against Tomba's 8.90, and 10,000 costs 200 against Tomba's 89. Phone numbers at 0.07 are 70 dollars per thousand and 700 per ten thousand, more than CUFinder's 299 for 10,000 mixed credits and well above SalesQL's 119 for 12,000. On that axis Exa loses to most of this batch. But that comparison misreads the product. What you are actually buying is the ability to find companies that no filter can describe, verify each one against your own criteria, and only then pay to enrich the survivors, with a research and monitoring layer on the same bill and no subscription underneath any of it. Nothing else in this category does that at any price. For a team whose bottleneck is knowing who to contact rather than how to reach them, 7 dollars per thousand searches with 10 dollars free every month is exceptional value. For a team that already has the list, it is simply the wrong tool.

Tomba

Usage-priced credits at a flat rate per thousand, bought as a monthly subscription or as a one-time block, with twelve-month credit validity and no conventional tier ladder.

• Free$0
• Growth$89
• Custom volume$8.90 per 1,000 credits

Tomba is the cheapest published per-unit price in this batch and one of the cheapest anywhere self-serve. At 1,000 verified emails a month you spend 8.90 dollars in finder credits, roughly 0.0089 per address, against Skrapp at 0.0145, GetProspect at 0.034, and Hunter's Starter at about 0.025 euros. At 10,000 emails a month you spend 89 dollars, well under Hunter's Growth tier at 149 euros for the same volume and better than any tier-laddered competitor here. Phone numbers are the weak point: at five credits, 1,000 mobiles costs 44.50 dollars and 10,000 costs 445, which is respectable in absolute terms but four to five times SalesQL's single-credit pool. The honest summary is that Tomba is the best price per email in this batch and a middling price per phone, and it is worth the switch mainly if you are calling the API rather than clicking a button, because the interface does not justify the move on its own.