How credits work

Credits are the unit every paid call is priced in. They exist so the product can buy live search data from its provider on your behalf without you holding a provider account, and so an agent can be told the price of an action before taking it.

What one credit is

Every paid call has a provider cost in dollars. IndexZero charges:

credits = ceil(providerCostUsd × 1.28 × 1000)

That is, 1,000 credits is roughly $1 of provider spend, with a 28% margin, rounded up per call. Rounding happens per metered call, not on the monthly total, so a call that costs $0.0002 still costs one credit.

What is free

Anything that reads data you already own or data IndexZero has already bought is free:

• Search Console, Google Analytics 4, and PostHog reports and the search-opportunity joins across them.
• Saved results: saved keywords and their cached metrics, rank-tracker snapshots and history, audit status, issues, and pages.
• Workspace calls: whoami, listing and creating projects, creating and editing rank trackers, and estimating a rank check.

Everything that buys live search data costs credits: keyword research and metrics, domain and backlink analysis, local search, running a rank check, running a site audit, and the AI-visibility tools. Each tool's reference page says which, and the MCP tool descriptions say so too, so an agent knows before it calls.

Two balances

Your workspace has two balances, and they behave differently.

Spending always draws from the monthly allowance first. That order is deliberate: a top-up bought mid-cycle is never wiped by the reset, because it is untouched until the allowance runs out.

whoami reports both balances and the period end, and the billing page in the app shows every charge with the tool that made it.

Before every paid call

Every paid call is checked against your balance before it runs and recorded after. The check is simple: if the balance is already zero, the call is refused with HTTP 402 and an INSUFFICIENT_CREDITS error, and nothing is charged. A call that starts with a positive balance runs to completion and can bring the balance to zero, but the balance never goes negative.

Two calls can cost a lot at once, and both give you a way to bound them:

• Rank checks. estimate_rank_tracker_cost is free and returns the exact credit cost of a run. run_rank_tracker accepts maxCostCredits and refuses, at no cost, if the estimate exceeds it. The rank-tracking page has the full cost model with worked examples.
• Site audits. Cost scales with page count. maxPages is capped by your plan rather than rejected, so the most a run can cost is bounded by the cap. See site audits.

The MCP server also tells every connected agent, in its instructions, to call whoami first, to always estimate before running a rank check, and to confirm with you before any single action expected to cost more than about 2,000 credits.

Running low

The app warns when the remaining balance drops below 10% of the plan's monthly allowance, with a floor of 250 credits so the warning on the Free plan still arrives while there is enough left to do something.

When the balance is exhausted, the free tools keep working. Paid calls return 402 until the next renewal or a top-up. Top-up packs are on the plans page.

Scheduled work and credits

A scheduled rank check that finds the workspace without enough credits is skipped, not run into debt, and the tracker records the reason (insufficient_credits) so you can see why a data point is missing. The same applies if the workspace drops to a plan without scheduled tracking (plan_required).