Credits and research costs
Understand shared budgets, estimates, reservations and settled job costs.
Credits belong to your workspace. The sidebar shows a balance overview; Billing shows the plan, available credits, usage and any additional-credit controls available to your role. Activity shows costs per job.
Estimate versus final cost
Catalog estimates help compare tools before execution. Open research can include several steps, such as resolving a company, searching the web and finding contact data. Its total can therefore differ from the price of a single direct lookup.
Job costs are aggregated before rounding to the displayed credit unit. A displayed estimate is not a guaranteed cap. Use a small representative sample to understand the cost of your actual question and inputs.
Reserved credits
A reservation sets credits aside for accepted work; it is not the same as a final charge. After execution, usage is settled and unused reserved credits can be released. While billing is pending, neither a missing amount nor an empty result means zero cost.
In the API, inspect billingStatus and credits alongside execution status. Use a settled amount for final reporting. If reconciliation is still pending, state that explicitly rather than presenting an estimate as final.
Missing answers and failures
No result does not mean every preceding step was free. A contact lookup may return nothing after real research has already identified the person. Equally, a technical failure must not be reported as a delivered answer. Inspect the item and its cost together.
For unclear reservations, retain the job and batch IDs, time and workspace. Contact support before repeating an ambiguous paid request. Reuse an original idempotency key only with its unchanged payload.
Plans and additional usage
Current allowances and prices are shown in Billing and Pricing. Owners and eligible administrators can manage the controls exposed to them. Additional usage must be enabled where supported; do not assume credits become unlimited when an included allowance runs out. See Billing settings.