Agent skill · marketing growth · jeremylongshore
exa-cost-tuning
Control Exa spend through endpoint selection, bounded result and content work, per-key budgets, and response-derived cost evidence. Use when operating or reviewing this Exa boundary. Trigger with "Exa cost tuning", "review Exa cost tuning", or "fix Exa cost tuning".
Why this skill is useful
Provides specific cost optimization strategies and executable scripts for reducing Exa API costs that the AI wouldn't generate on its own.
What it needs
Requires bash installed locally. Requires exa account access. About 3k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 2,604 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Exa Cost and Credit Control Overview Control Exa spend through endpoint selection, bounded result and content work, per-key budgets, and response-derived cost evidence. Treat credentials, queries, retrieved content, generated output, spend, and destructive state as separately governed boundaries. Prerequisites The target repository, environment, Exa team, product surface, and accountable owner. The workload's data classification, latency and freshness promise, cost ceiling, and retention policy. Current first-party documentation plus credentials only for a narrowly approved live check. Current Contract Exa uses prepaid pay-as-you-go credits unless an enterprise contract says otherwise. Search, Contents, Answer, Monitors, and Agent have different pricing; additional results, summaries, deep types, provider calls, and metered Agent effort can add cost. Higher credit balance does not raise rate limits. Authentication For normal REST work, inject EXAAPIKEY from an approved server-side secret manager and send it only as Authorization: Bearer to the configured first-party Exa API host. Team Management service keys, hosted MCP OAuth or enterprise managed authorization, and payment-protocol calls are separate trust models. Never print, commit, place in a URL, or expose a credential to an untrusted client. Instructions 1. Name the budget owner, team, workload, endpoint mix, and forecast horizon. 2. Verify current first-party pricing or the signed enterprise schedule. 3. Cap results, content types, subpages, freshness, Agent effort, and retry attempts. 4. Use key-level budgets where enabled and independent application-side circuit breakers. 5. Reconcile response costDollars and dashboard billing against workload identifiers. 6. Alert before credit exhaustion and review auto-recharge with its monthly maximum. Tool Discipline Use Read, Glob, and Grep to inspect repository code, configuration, fixtures, and evidence. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills jeremylongshore/exa-cost-tuning