Concepts
How credits work
One balance, an estimate before every spend, a reservation before every vendor call, and a ledger you can export.
A credit is one unit of discretionary research: keyword research, metric refresh, ad-hoc SERP and competitor lookups, site audits, and agent calls. There is one balance and you can always see it in the top bar.
Scheduled rank tracking is not on this meter — it runs on the keyword slots your plan includes, and costs nothing in credits. See billing and plans for how slots work.
The rule
Nothing that costs credits happens without telling you first. Every paid button carries its own estimate. Every result that cost credits says so in its header. There is no exception anywhere in the product, and if you find one it is a bug worth reporting.
What things cost
| Action | Credits |
|---|---|
| Keyword search, 100 rows | 12 |
| Keyword search, 250 rows | 21 |
| Keyword search, 500 rows | 36 |
| Keyword search, 1,000 rows | 66 |
| Real clickstream volumes | ×2 |
| Refreshing metrics on a saved keyword | 1 |
| Ad-hoc SERP or competitor lookup outside a tracker | 1 |
| Scheduled rank tracking | 0 — paid in keyword slots |
| Saving, tagging, filtering, exporting, reading history | 0 |
Estimate, reserve, fetch, settle
Behind each of those buttons is the same four-step sequence, and it exists to make two specific failures impossible.
- Estimate. A pure calculation from the parameters. No network call, no charge.
- Reserve. The credits are held on your balance before the vendor is contacted. If you cannot afford it, the action is refused here — you are never charged for a call that already went out.
- Fetch. We call the data provider.
- Settle. The hold is converted into a charge for what it actually cost. If the real cost came in under the estimate, the difference goes back. If the call failed, the whole hold is released.
The two failures this rules out: being billed for something that did not work, and discovering an overspend after the money is gone.
Allowance and purchased credits
There are two kinds of credit in one balance.
- Research allowance — included with a plan, replaced at each renewal. Use it or lose it.
- Purchased — bought as a credit pack. Never expires.
Spending always draws on the allowance first, so the credits you paid cash for are the last to go. At renewal, whatever is left of the allowance expires and the new month's is granted. Nothing you bought is ever clawed back — not on downgrade, not on cancellation.
Caching: you are not billed for looking
Paid results are cached for 24 hours against the exact parameters that produced them. Reloading the page, switching tabs, coming back from lunch, reconnecting to wifi — none of these call the vendor and none of them cost anything. The result header tells you when you are looking at cached data.
The cache key normalises the obvious things, so Project Management and
project management are the same search and hit the same entry.
The ledger
Every credit movement is a row: grants, purchases, reservations, charges, releases, refunds, expiries and manual adjustments. Each row records the balance after it and what it was for, and the whole thing exports to CSV from the billing page.
Ledger rows are append-only. Nothing rewrites history — a correction is a new row, which is the only way a balance is ever worth trusting.
Running out
You cannot go negative. An action you cannot afford is refused before anything is spent, and the message says exactly what it needed and what you have. You get an email when your balance drops below 10%, once per period, not once per day.
Scheduled rank tracking keeps running regardless — it is paid in keyword slots, not credits, so a zero balance never stops a tracker.
Next: where the data comes from.