API credits

The Search API is prepaid. You hold a balance of API credits, denominated in your account's currency, and each billable API request draws it down. This is the Anthropic-style model: pay for what you use, from a balance you top up in advance. Search on the site is covered by your membership and never touches this balance — credits are for the API only.

Two buckets

Your balance is the sum of two separate buckets:

A request spends the included bucket first, then the purchased bucket, so your monthly allotment is always used before any credit you paid for. A deduction never drives a bucket below zero; an in-flight request always completes, and the balance floors at zero.

The monthly allotment

Every active membership includes 250 API requests worth of credit each period, dropped into the included bucket. In USD that is $5.00 (250 × $0.02 per request); the equivalent amount is granted in each region's currency. The allotment is granted when your membership becomes active and re-granted at the start of every billing period.

What a request costs

Each billable request costs a fixed amount in your currency:

Checking your balance

• In the browser — open Settings → Billing → API credits (or just /account/credits). It shows the total, each bucket, when the included bucket resets, and an estimate of how many further requests the balance covers.
• From the API — call GET /v1/usage. It returns included_cents, purchased_cents, the total, and an estimated request count, and it never consumes credit. The same balance rides on every billable response in the X-Credits-Balance and X-Credits-Requests-Remaining headers.

When the balance runs out

When the balance reaches zero the billable API endpoints return 402 insufficient_credits. The fix is to buy more credits or turn on auto-reload. Reading your usage still works at zero — GET /v1/usage is never credit-gated.