Plans vs credits: why we never mix them
A subscription buys capacity. Credits buy discretionary work. Most tools blur the two into one allowance and call it simple — here's why we kept them apart, and what it buys you.
This is the last post in a three-part run on billing, and it answers the question the first two left open. We've written about showing the cost before you click and about what happens when that cost hits zero. Both posts talk about credits. Neither talks about the other half of the bill: your plan. That's on purpose — they're not the same thing, and keeping them apart is the actual decision, not a footnote.
The version we didn't build
The obvious way to price this product is one number: pay $X a month, get $X worth of usage, spend it on whatever — research, tracking, audits, all pulled from the same pool. It's simple to explain and simple to bill.
It's also the version that makes your bill unpredictable. Set up a daily rank tracker on that model and forget about it, and it quietly drains the same allowance you need for next week's research — with no warning until you go to run a search and find the pool already gone. The tier you're on and the amount of data you can pull become the same number, so "I need more tracking" and "I need more research" turn into the same support ticket. That's the shape OpenSEO runs today: $10 a month includes $10 of usage, and everything — tracking included — draws down the same meter.
What we do instead
Two things are for sale, and they answer two different questions.
A plan answers "how much can I track." It's capacity: projects, seats, a pool of keyword slots, daily checks, local tracking, email reports, agent access. A keyword slot is one keyword, one market, checked weekly on mobile, to the top 20 — checking daily instead of weekly costs 7 slots, adding desktop doubles it. Once a tracker is running inside your slot pool, it costs nothing beyond being in the pool. Scheduled rank tracking never touches your credits. Not partially, not "up to a point" — never.
Credits answer "how much can I research." Keyword research, metric refresh, ad-hoc SERP and competitor lookups, site audits, agent calls — the work that varies session to session, the kind you can't size in advance the way you can size a tracker. Every plan includes a monthly research allowance that resets each period; buy credit packs on top of that whenever you want, and they never expire.
Neither one runs into the other. A daily tracker you forgot about can't eat your research budget, because it was never drawing from it. A big research session can't threaten your tracking, because tracking was never paid for with credits in the first place. The two numbers on your bill mean exactly one thing each.
Why this is worth the extra number
A single bundled allowance is easier to describe in a pricing table. It is not easier to budget against, because "how much can I do this month" depends on a mix of fixed, predictable work (tracking the same keywords every week) and variable, bursty work (researching a new client, auditing a site you just picked up) — and blending them into one number means the predictable part can get eaten by the unpredictable part with no warning.
Splitting them means each one can be priced the way it actually behaves. Tracking capacity scales with keyword slots, is flat, and is easy to reason about: 150 slots is 150 slots, whether you use them on three quiet client sites or one busy one. Research is genuinely variable — some months you're heads-down on five new audits, some months you're just watching trackers tick over — so it's the one thing metered by the click, with the estimate-then-reserve mechanic doing the work of keeping that variability from turning into a surprise.
What this looks like in practice
Spending always draws your plan's monthly research allowance first; credit packs you bought outright are the last to go, and they carry over indefinitely — nothing you paid cash for gets clawed back because a month was slow. If you downgrade and your tracked keywords now need more slots than the new plan's pool, the trackers over the line go read-only instead of being deleted — you keep the history, you just stop paying for capacity you're not on a plan for anymore. Full mechanics, including what happens on upgrade and cancellation, are in billing and plans.
Two numbers, two jobs, and neither one can quietly become the other. That's the whole rule — see the pricing page for what it actually costs on each tier.