# 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.

> [!info] 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.

## Related

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