# Credit

A credit is the billing unit of the whole API: one credit buys one fresh lookup that produced a usable answer, on any of the six signals.

Date: 2026-09-10

A credit is the billing unit of the whole API: one credit buys one fresh lookup that produced a usable answer, on any of the six signals. There is one balance and it does not care which endpoint spends it.

## What does not cost one

Three things, and they are the reason the rate card exists rather than a single sentence.

A **non-answer** is free. What counts as one differs by signal and is published per signal on the [pricing page](/pricing): an undeliverable email address, an invalid phone number, an unparseable postal address, an identifier no installed register carries. A **rejected request** is free — a validation error, a refused key, a rate limit. And a **repeat** of the same value inside seven days is free, held as a keyed marker that stores a hash rather than the value.

An answer lost to an outage in the partner infrastructure behind the mailbox handshake is also free, because nothing was established.

## When there are none left

The API answers [`402 INSUFFICIENT_CREDITS`](/docs/errors/INSUFFICIENT_CREDITS) *before* running the lookup, so an empty balance never bills for work that could not complete. Free credits renew at the start of each month; bought credits never expire.

`meta.credits_used` on every response says what that call actually cost, including zero.

Reference: https://spaw.co/glossary/credit