Balance and pricing

Your balance

Your account holds a balance in US dollars. Each request is charged from it at your tier's price; there are no subscriptions, billing cycles or overage. The API keeps its field names from earlier versions, but every credit field carries dollars: X-Credits-Charged: 0.00062 means the request cost $0.00062.

Free requests

A new account gets 100 free requests on any engine, no card needed. They are used before your balance, each covers a whole request whatever its add-ons or pages, and a request that fails gives its free request back. A request served free reports X-Credits-Charged: 0.

Topping up

Add any amount from $1 on the Billing page of the dashboard. You can also save a top-up amount there: it is offered as a one-click top-up on the Billing page. Nothing is charged automatically.

Price tiers

Your tier is set by what you spent over the last 30 days; on bigger tiers ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google News cost less per request, and the other engines cost the same on every tier. Every account starts on Starter. You move up as soon as your 30-day spend reaches a tier's threshold, and drop back only when it falls below half of it.

Price per 1,000 requests by engine and tier (base request, no add-ons):

What a request costs

Each engine has a base price, listed above and on the pricing page. Add-ons cost the same dollars on every tier. Google Search charges the extra results pages returned and the AI Overview only when the response holds one; Google News pages after the first are free. A synchronous call costs the same as an async task. On Google Search a query with a search operator (site:, intitle:, filetype: and the like) counts each page 5 times, every one past the first at the extra page price, and multiplies the AI Overview as much; on every other engine it costs the same as any query. AI Mode's include.expandProducts is not available yet: a request that sets it is refused with a 400 and not charged.

Reservation and charge

An accepted request reserves its maximum possible cost; a task shows it as credits.creditsToCharge. On success it is charged the actual cost, which depends on what the result contains (for example the Google pages returned, or whether it holds an AI Overview) and never exceeds the reservation. The charge appears as credits.creditsCharged and in X-Credits-Charged. A request that fails is charged nothing and its reservation is released, and tasks cleared from the queue were never charged.

A new request is accepted only while your balance, less what open requests have reserved, covers its maximum cost. The tasks of a batch are checked in order, so later ones can fail with INSUFFICIENT_CREDITS while earlier ones are queued.

Checking your balance

GET /v1/credits returns remaining: the US dollars you can still spend, your balance less what open tasks hold back. perCycle and cycleResetsAt are kept for compatibility and are always null.

curl

curl -X GET "https://api.answerline.dev/v1/credits" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY"

TypeScript

const { remaining } = await client.credits();

Python

balance = client.credits()
print(balance["remaining"])

Running out

A request your balance can't cover is refused with 403 INSUFFICIENT_CREDITS and nothing is charged. Top up on the Billing page and send it again. Account owners get an email when a funded balance drops below $1.

Refunds and disputes

A refunded top-up, or a card dispute you lose, takes its amount off your balance. That can leave the balance negative; while it is negative every request is refused until a top-up brings it back to zero or above.

More free requests

Write a review, link to us or introduce yourself in our community, then claim the bonus on the Billing page; each approved program adds 1,000 free requests once. The Referrals page has a link that earns a commission on the ChatGPT, Gemini, Google News, and Perplexity usage of the accounts you refer.