Count requests rather than statements
Every successful retrieval request costs one credit, even if the query returns an empty result set. This means that billing is tied to the action of fetching data rather than the volume of records returned. Understanding this cost structure helps in planning experiments where multiple iterations or broad searches are required without worrying about record count charges affecting your budget.
The rate is $1 per 1000 successful requests, or $0.001 per credit. A $50 minimum paid top-up adds 50000 credits. One successful transit query with limit=3 uses one credit whether it returns zero, one or three records. It does not buy three opinions, a full discussion or a measurement of activity. Local rereading, classification and overlap checks on a saved response use no additional API credit.
A lost response does not establish that a request failed on the server. It may already have completed and been charged; a successful retry incurs another credit. Distinguish that uncertainty from an invalid request, which is not debited, or an upstream failure, whose reservation is refunded. Budget retries as possible additional retrievals instead of treating every client error as a refund.
