Limits and credits

Credits, not requests

A call costs credits, and different oracles can cost different numbers of them. Today chart, vector-graphics and coverage-policy each cost one.

That is not a pricing gimmick. Oracles do different amounts of work to reach a verdict, and charging per request would make the cheap ones subsidise the expensive ones until we had to stop offering the expensive ones.

Each oracle's cost is on the Oracles page, and every answer carries the credits it actually cost.

A billable call is one where the check reached a verdict. valid and invalid both bill; error — our failure — is refunded and costs 0. See Verdicts.

Credits are prepaid, and they do not expire

You hold a balance. It is the second thing a call is paid from — the first is your plan's monthly allowance, below — and nothing resets it at the end of the month. A new organisation starts with no balance: its calls come from the free plan's allowance of 20 credits a month, which is enough to find out whether this works for you without talking to anyone.

When the balance runs low you buy more, in any amount, on the Credits page. What you buy is added to what you have; it is not a new allowance replacing an old one, and unused credits are never swept.

Plans

An organisation carries a plan — free, pro or enterprise — and the plan sets a monthly allowance of credits. Every call is paid from the allowance first; only when the allowance is spent does a call reach your credit balance. Credits never expire. So a pro organisation that uses its whole allowance in a period pays for the rest of that period's calls from credits, and one that stays inside it touches its credits not at all.

The allowance runs on your billing period. A subscriber is billed from the day they subscribed and every month after; the allowance resets on that same day, not on the first of the calendar month, and does not carry over. A free organisation has no billing period, so its allowance resets on the first of each calendar month.

pro and enterprise are subscriptions: you choose one on the Billing page, pay by card, and it renews every month until you cancel. Everything after that happens on the same page, with no redirect: switch between the paid plans, cancel, take a cancellation back, change the card the plan renews on, and read your invoices. An upgrade takes effect at once: the difference for the rest of the period is charged now (any credit on your account is used first), and the allowance rises with it. A downgrade waits for the end of the period you have paid for — you keep the larger allowance until then, the renewal is billed at the lower price, and nothing is charged or credited when you make the switch; you can take it back until the period ends. Cancelling is always at the end of the period you have paid for: the plan keeps working until then, then drops to free, and until then you can keep it after all. Cancelling drops a downgrade you had scheduled.

If you need volume beyond enterprise, an invoice rather than a card, or a support commitment, ask us.

Every oracle is included regardless of plan. What you buy is volume, never access — an agent whose tool set changes with an invoice is an agent that stops reaching for tools.

Running out

A call that cannot be paid for answers 402 QUOTA_EXCEEDED, with the numbers in context:

{
  "error": "QUOTA_EXCEEDED",
  "detail": "this organisation does not have enough credits for that call",
  "context": {
    "balance": "0",
    "needed": "1",
    "limit": "20",
    "used": "20",
    "plan": "free"
  }
}

balance is what you hold and needed is what the call would have cost — those two are what to act on. limit and used describe the current allowance period — the calendar month on free, your billing period on a subscription. They are for display; balance and needed decide whether a call proceeds.

Every value in context is a string. That is true of every error this API returns, not a quirk of this one.

Credits are per organisation, not per key. Minting a second key does not buy a second balance — see Authentication for what a second key is actually for.

Requests per minute

Each plan publishes a requests_per_minute figure, and you can read it in the console.

Pace your calls to it; it may be enforced without notice. What decides whether a call proceeds is your allowance and credit balance.

Keys

max_live_keys bounds how many unrevoked keys an organisation may hold at once. It is not a security control — credits are shared across all of them — it keeps the key list readable and bounds runaway automation. Revoking frees a slot immediately.

Watching spend

The Usage page shows what this period has spent and a log of every metered call: which oracle, which key, what verdict, what it cost. Refunded calls appear with 0 credits rather than not appearing, so an outage is visible after the fact.

The Credits page shows the balance itself and every movement of it — each purchase, any opening credit, and what has been spent since.