Free
$0 No card.
1,000 credits / month
- Basic search
- 1 credit
- Advanced search
- 2 credits
- Extraction
- 1 credit / 5 URLs
Pricing
One balance, priced by what it costs us
One balance, and a price list that says what everything draws from it. A snippet search is a handful of requests; fetching and reading every result costs more. You can work out what a call costs before you make it, and anything not yet available says so rather than carrying a price.
Scale
$49 Per month.
8,000 credits / month
- Basic search
- 1 credit
- Advanced search
- 2 credits
- Extraction
- 1 credit / 5 URLs
$0.00613a credit
We print it because it is the number worth comparing. A plan price next to an allowance just leaves everyone doing the same division by hand. A basic search costs one credit, so on Scale a search costs about a tenth of a cent and reading every result costs twice that. Work out your monthly volume, multiply, and you have the bill before you write any code.
What counts as what
| Meter | Charged when |
|---|---|
search | 1 credit at basic depth, 2 at
advanced, which fetches and reads every result.
|
extract | 1 credit per 5 URLs. Batches that produce nothing are refunded, so you pay for content we actually returned. |
render | 5 credits, once per fetch that needs a real browser. Charged only when a plain fetch comes back with too little content to be worth returning, such as a page that renders its body with JavaScript, so most fetches never reach this meter. |
The whole cost of a call is taken before the work, because charging afterwards makes the
ceiling soft under concurrency, and charging in pieces would let a request be
half-served. Requests that fail outright are refunded. Running out returns
429 naming the cost, never a surprise invoice.
Questions
About the bill
What is a credit?
The single unit everything draws from. There is one balance rather than a separate allowance per operation, so you can spend it however your workload actually falls instead of being refused for a reason you could not have predicted.
When am I charged?
Before the work, once, for the whole call. Charging afterwards makes the ceiling soft under concurrency, and charging in pieces would let a request be half-served. Requests that fail outright are refunded, and extraction batches that produce nothing are refunded by batch.
What happens when I run out?
The next call returns 429 naming what it would have cost and what your limit is. There is no metered overage and no surprise invoice: usage above your allowance is refused rather than billed.
Why does advanced cost more than basic?
Because it does more work. Basic returns what the index already knows. Advanced fetches every result, extracts the readable content and ranks passages against your query, which is an order of magnitude more bandwidth, time and CPU. Setting include_raw_content implies advanced depth and is charged at that rate, because it cannot be honoured without the page text.
Do I need a card to try it?
No. The free tier is 1,000 credits a month with no card and the same API the paid plan gets, so an evaluation set tells you what you would actually be buying.
Who takes the payment?
Polar, as merchant of record. Buying does not require signing up first: the paid webhook creates the account and emails a set-password link, because making someone create an account before they can pay is friction with nothing behind it.
Try it before you weigh it up
1,000 credits a month, no card, and the same API the paid plan gets.