Exa API returned 402 errors

Exa API calls returned HTTP 402 errors on September 8, 2026, and a news-briefing workflow stopped before it could assemble a cited roundup. The failed requests were tied to three topic queries — “Trump Harris debate fallout,” “Fed rate cut expectations,” and “Taiwan Strait military tensions” — and the system had no usable article text, titles or URLs after the calls failed. (exa.ai) Without source material, the workflow concluded it could not produce a world-news briefing that met its sourcing rules. Exa’s own documentation gives two main paths to a 402 response. (exa.ai) The company’s billing page says API requests are blocked when an account’s credit balance runs out. A separate Exa documentation page says the company also uses HTTP 402 “Payment Required” for x402 payment flows, in which a client without an API key receives payment instructions and must retry with payment credentials. ### Which requests failed in the briefing workflow? Three named searches failed in the source packet: “Trump Harris debate fallout,” “Fed rate cut expectations,” and “Taiwan Strait military tensions.” The packet did not include article bodies, source names or destination URLs for any of them. The missing fields mattered because the writer’s instructions required citations and limited the briefing to supplied material. With no titles or links to cite, the workflow had no basis to draft a sourced roundup. ### What does a 402 status code mean in Exa’s system? (exa.ai) Exa’s billing documentation says the company uses a pay-as-you-go credit system and that requests are blocked when the credit balance runs out. The same page says team owners can add credits from the billing page or enable auto-recharge. Exa’s x402 guide says 402 can also be part of an intentional payment handshake. In that setup, a request sent without an API key or payment header receives a 402 response with pricing details, and the client must resubmit the request with a payment signature. Exa says API-key billing and x402 billing are separate paths. ### Does the error point to billing, authentication, or an outage? Exa’s public status page was available when checked, but the search results reviewed here did not show a specific incident notice tied to the failed briefing requests. (exa.ai) That means the existence of a broad platform outage could not be confirmed from the surfaced status material alone. The documentation does support two narrower explanations. One is exhausted account credits under Exa’s standard billing model. The other is a client hitting a payment-required path — such as x402 or MPP — without completing the required payment retry. (exa.ai) Exa’s MPP documentation describes a similar 402 payment challenge for requests made without the right payment credential. ### Why did the 402 stop the article-writing step completely? Exa markets its service as a search API for real-time web data, and its Contents API is the step that retrieves page text from URLs or document IDs. (status.exa.ai) If the search layer does not return results, the downstream writer has nothing to pass into content retrieval or citation formatting. The failure was therefore not just a missing search result. It broke the chain needed to collect article text, capture source titles and preserve URLs for attribution. (exa.ai) ### What should an operator check first? Exa’s billing page says remaining balance is visible in the dashboard and that requests are blocked when credits run out. Exa’s pricing page says the service is pay-as-you-go, with charges based on request type. Those two pages are the first checks if a workflow suddenly starts returning 402s under API-key billing. (exa.ai) Exa’s payment-flow documentation points to a second check: whether the client is sending the expected API key, bearer token or payment headers. The x402 and MPP guides both say a request can receive 402 until the client completes the required payment step and retries correctly. Exa’s status page remains the place to watch for any broader incident notice, while the billing dashboard, pricing page and API configuration determine whether the next run will return article URLs and text. (status.exa.ai) (exa.ai 1) (exa.ai 2)