How are credits calculated?
What can each credit be used for? What are Premium Sites? We'll try to answer those questions for you here.
What is a credit?
Each plan gives you a certain number of monthly or yearly credits. Depending on the number of rows you extract in a task, the screenshots you capture, and whether a site is Premium, each task will cost you from one to several credits.
How are credits used?
- Minimum cost per task: 1 credit on most sites, 2-10 credits on Premium sites
- Cost for extracting a row of data: 0.1 credit
- Cost for capturing a screenshot: 1 credit
You can extract 10 rows of data from a page with each credit. Each task you run costs a minimum of 1 credit which includes extracting up to 10 rows of data.
Another way to put it would be when you extract from detail pages, each page takes 1 credit, and when you extract lists, every 10 list items take 1 credit (generally speaking).
A small number of sites require premium IP addresses, solving captchas, or a large volume of files to load. Those sites are marked as Premium, and each task on these sites has a minimum credit cost between 2 and 10.
Do my credits roll over to the next month?
On our paid plans, you can choose between monthly or annual subscriptions. It is worth noting that in either scenario, whether it be on a monthly or yearly basis, any credits that were not utilized in the previous period will not be carried over to the next one.
How many credits does it take to monitor data?
Each monitoring check is a task and its credit usage is the same as running a task to extract that data.
Examples
Let's go through some common examples to better understand credits:
Example 1: Extracting a list of 1,000 companies from a site
Assuming you can extract the full list in a single task (with or without pagination), the task will take 100 credits.
1,000 rows x 0.1 credit per row = 100
Whether or not the site is Premium does not matter in this example, because the task takes more than 10 credits.
Example 2: Extracting a list of 8 companies
This task will take 1 credit.
The cost based on the number of rows is only 0.8 credits (8 x 0.1 credit per row), but each task takes a minimum of 1 credit.
Example 3: Extracting the details of 50 different products from their detail pages
If there are 50 product detail pages and you need to extract a row of data from each, it would take 50 tasks and therefore 50 credits.
Example 4 (Deep Scraping): Extracting a list of 100 links and extracting details from each link
The first task which extracts the list of 100 links will take 10 credits.
The next 100 tasks that will extract the details of each item from its detail page will take 100 credits.
The total extraction will therefore take 110 credits.
Example 5: Extracting lists of products from 20 different product categories with 500 products in each
If there are 20 different product categories with 500 products in each, you are probably training a robot to extract all products in a category and then bulk-running it for those 20 categories.
Each task will take 50 credits (500 x 0.1 credit per row).
And because you need 20 tasks, altogether, they will take 20 x 50 = 1,000 credits.
Example 6: Extracting a list of 45 companies from a Premium site
Let's assume that we are extracting data from a Premium site with a minimum credit cost of 10 per task.
Assuming you can extract the full list in a single task (with or without pagination), the task will take 10 credits.
The cost based on the list size is only 4.5 credits, but in this case, the Premium site's minimum credit cost per task is greater than that.
Example 7: Monitoring 50 product detail pages for changes
If you monitor 50 product detail pages for changes checking every 3 days, it will take about 500 credits per month.
50 credits per task x 30 days per month / 3 day interval = 500 credits per month
Example 8: Monitoring a list of 50 products for changes
If you monitor a list of 50 products on a page for changes checking every 3 days, it will take about 50 credits per month.
50 rows per task x 0.1 credit per row x 30 days per month / 3 day interval = 50 credits per month
How can I reduce my credit usage?
- If you are extracting from or monitoring several detail pages, check if there is another page on that site with a list of multiple items on a single page. Extracting lists is 10x less costly than detail pages.
- If you are monitoring, reduce the frequency of monitoring checks as much as possible.
- If you are on a Professional, Company, or Custom plan and you have a robot that is taking thousands of credits every month, contact our support and ask us to optimize it. We may be able to optimize it to use fewer resources and apply a credit discount to it moving forward.
- We are working on automatically applying these optimizations and discounts to robots. Stay tuned!