Pricing and credits

API usage is metered in credits. Every metered response reports its cost in X-Credits-Cost.

Plans

Plan	Price	Credits/month	Rate limit	Support
Developer	free	500	60 req/min	2 business days
Scale	$99/month	10,000	300 req/min	1 business day
Enterprise	custom	custom	custom	4 hours, SLA, DPA, EU residency

Top-ups are $10 per 1,000 credits and never expire. Plan credits reset monthly and do not roll over.

API credits are separate from app credits

A Premium or Advanced subscription to scispace.com does not include API credits, and API usage does not draw from that balance.

Cost per operation

Operation	standard	high_quality	deep_review
Search	5	15	60
Chat message	2	6	20
Topic search	4	12	—
Extraction, per source	2	5	—
Document ingest	1 per 10 pages, min 1	—	—
Paraphrase	1 per 500 words	—	—
Detection	1 per 1,000 words	—	—
Citation format	0	—	—

At 5 credits per standard search, the free Developer plan covers 100 searches a month and Scale covers 2,000.

What is explicitly free

Every GET: retrieving, listing, and paginating any resource
jobs status checks and usage reports
Citation style listing and formatting
Exports to CSV, XLSX, BibTeX, and RIS
Cancelling a running job — you are still charged for work already done

Free reads are deliberate: polling and pagination should never be a cost decision.

Overage

The default is a hard stop. A call you cannot pay for returns 402 insufficient_credits and creates nothing — no partial charge, no partial resource. Enable auto-top-up in billing settings if you would rather buy credits than fail.

Per-key monthly caps let one workload fail without taking down the rest (api-keys).

Changes to this policy

Price and credit-cost increases are announced 30 days ahead by email to organization owners and in the changelog. Existing top-up credits are honoured at the rate they were purchased.

credit · usage · cost-control · rate-limits · teams-and-scopes

Last updated 2026-08-10