Credits

You pay credits only for a successful request. The price depends on the rendering tier that served the request and on the proxy class it ran on. ai_extract Coming soon adds 4, and a solved challenge or CAPTCHA adds 5. Failures and non-billable target statuses cost 0. A cache hit is billed at the same price as the fetch that stored it. The X-Credits-Charged header on every response tells you what that request billed, and X-Credits-Remaining what is left of your monthly allowance after it.

curl -sS -D - -o /dev/null "https://api.spicrawl.com/v1/scrape" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPICRAWL_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com/products/42", "js_render": true, "max_cost": 3}' \
  | grep -i -E '^(x-credits-charged|x-request-cost|x-credits-remaining|cache-state):'

X-Credits-Charged: 3
X-Request-Cost: 3
X-Credits-Remaining: 976
Cache-State: miss

Price table

Credits per successful request.

• Your own proxy (proxy) adds no proxy surcharge: it is priced in the first price column. Spicrawl's managed residential exits Coming soon are not available yet.
• ai_extract Coming soon adds 4 credits on top of the rendering price. Together with the solve surcharge below, these are the only additive items.
• A solve adds 5 credits on top of the rendering price, once per request. It applies only when a challenge or CAPTCHA was solved on the tier that served the page. It is not charged when the solve failed, when the request failed, or on a cache hit. For example, a solve_captcha request that is solved on full-browser rendering costs 8 + 5 = 13, and the same request whose solve fails costs 8. The surcharge does not refuse a request: if max_cost is lower than the price plus 5, the request runs without solving, at its normal price. See Cloudflare.
• You do not pick the rendering tier. The engine and headless request fields are deprecated and ignored: rendering is chosen automatically from the request (the response carries X-Warning: ENGINE_IGNORED). The flags above choose it, and a request is billed for the tier that served it.
• mode=auto tries a plain fetch, then JavaScript rendering, then full-browser rendering, then stealth rendering Coming soon, moving up only when the previous step was met by a challenge. It bills only the tier that served the page. If every step fails, it bills 0.
• A bot challenge (Cloudflare and similar) on a request through your own proxy moves a plain fetch or js_render request to a stronger rendering path on the same exit, billed the same way: only the tier that returned the page (full-browser rendering 8, stealth rendering Coming soon 25), 0 if every step was challenged. Automatic handling on managed premium exits is coming soon Coming soon. On the default shared pool a challenged page returns ERR::UPSTREAM::CHALLENGE at 0 credits; retry through your own residential proxy. If a request uses your own proxy and hits a blocking challenge that Spicrawl solves, your proxy's address and credentials are shared with the third-party solving service for that solve. Without your own proxy, a blocked request may be completed through a residential exit of ours at no change in price beyond the solve surcharge. See Anti-bot.
• A cache hit (Cache-State: hit) is billed at the same price as the fetch that stored it, so a repeat costs what the first request did. The cache saves the fetch (latency and load on the target), not credits. See Caching.

Remote browser sessions

A GET /v1/browser CDP session is priced the same as one full-browser page: 8 credits per started minute (a 10-second session is 1 minute = 8 credits). At admission the session holds the price of its whole session_ttl against your monthly allowance (default session_ttl 180 s = 24 credits; the 60–900 s range = 8–120 credits); if the remaining allowance cannot cover that hold, the session is refused with 402 ERR::LIMIT::QUOTA_EXCEEDED before any browser is leased, and a shorter session_ttl may fit. At close, the session is charged for the minutes it actually held (capped at session_ttl's minutes) and the unused part of the hold is returned immediately. A session the platform ends (the browser backend dropped it, or the API shut down) costs 0. A session that never opens costs 0 and returns its hold.

Free, at any rendering tier:

What costs 0

Target statuses 200, 404 and 410 are billable successes. Add others with allowed_status_codes, for example [403] if a 403 page is the content you want.

Retrying a failed request costs nothing extra, but POST /v1/scrape is not idempotent: repeating a request that succeeded bills it again, even when the cache serves the repeat.

Cap a request with max_cost

max_cost is a credit ceiling for one request. 0 (the default) means no ceiling. Spicrawl checks it against the dearest outcome the request could reach before anything runs. If that outcome is over the ceiling, the request fails with 400 ERR::LIMIT::MAX_COST_EXCEEDED at 0 credits.

The move to a stronger rendering path on a bot challenge never fails this check. A step that costs more than max_cost is left off, so the request runs without it, at the price of its first tier.

Read the bill in headers

X-Credits-Charged and X-Request-Cost differ exactly when nothing was billed: a site answering 403 gives X-Request-Cost: 3 and X-Credits-Charged: 0 on a JavaScript render. The JSON envelope repeats the charge as credits.

Monthly credit ceiling

Each organization has a monthly credit ceiling (the beta has one plan for everyone: 1,000 credits/month). The allowance month is the org's own anniversary month: it runs from the day the org was created and resets at 00:00 UTC on that day every month (an org created on the 29th, 30th or 31st resets on the last day of a shorter month). Before a request runs, Spicrawl reserves its dearest possible cost against the allowance. For a request that could move to a stronger rendering path on a bot challenge, that is the dearest step it could reach (25 on your own proxy); if the allowance covers the first tier but not that, the request runs without the move. When the allowance is used up, requests fail with 402 ERR::LIMIT::QUOTA_EXCEEDED (not retryable), naming the exact reset date, until the ceiling is raised or the allowance resets. A cache hit is held first, at its own price, and is refused with the same 402 when the allowance left is below it: nothing is served or charged. See Errors.

To see how many credits are left, read X-Credits-Remaining on a /v1/scrape response, or on a batch submit, append or retry response. It is the allowance left after that request's charge (for a batch call, after its hold), in whole credits rounded down, and it counts credits held for work in flight the same way allowance.used_micro below does. It is never negative; on a 402 it can be above 0, meaning less than that request needed. It is absent when your organization has no monthly limit, when the request was refused before the credit check (a validation error, a rate or concurrency limit), or when the balance could not be read at that moment.

For the full picture, or without a request to read the header from, call GET /v1/usage/summary (needs a key with the read scope; 1 credit = 1,000,000 micro-credits):

• allowance is the ceiling as it is enforced: limit_micro, used_micro, remaining_micro, limit_source (default, or override when your organization has its own limit), window_start and resets_at. allowance.remaining_micro is the number to show as "credits left". It includes extra_micro, any extra credits granted to your organization on top of the monthly limit: they are spent after the monthly allowance and are kept when it resets. Its used_micro counts credits currently held for work in flight (an open browser session holds its whole session_ttl price; a batch job holds its unfinished items' prices) as well as credits spent.
• credits is metered usage for the period from the daily rollup: included_micro, used_micro, remaining_micro. It counts spent credits only, batch items included, but not credits held for work still running, so it can be lower than allowance.used_micro.

An organization with no subscription is on the free plan: plan.code is free, plan.subscription_status is none, plan.period_source is allowance_month, and credits.included_micro is the monthly ceiling.

Batch budgets

A batch job is billed per item, only for items that succeed, at the same prices as /v1/scrape. Submitting a job charges nothing (X-Credits-Charged: 0), but its X-Credits-Remaining already counts the whole hold (estimated_credits) as used.

Batch refuses ai_extract, extract and the other parameters its worker cannot run with a 400 at submission, so a batch item is never priced or charged for them. See Batch.