How credits work

Reading: one credit per page, once

Uploading a document reads it, splits it into pages and indexes it, at one credit per page. That is charged once per document — not once per table, and not again when you add a column later.

A credit is $0.01, fixed. So a 40-page lease costs 40 credits, or 40 cents, to read for good, and a single image — a photographed page, a screenshot — is one page and therefore one credit.

Answering: per cell, at the column’s rate

Each answered cell is charged at its column’s rate on success. Typed and scalar columns sit at 1 credit; list and enumeration columns typically cost around 3, because they fan out into more retrieval and a longer generation. An image column is charged like a typed one — finding the picture and the region it sits in is part of answering, not a surcharge.

A table’s cost is therefore rows × columns × rate, which is worth doing in your head before adding a list column to four hundred rows. Three consequences:

• Failed cells are not charged. A cell you override was charged when it ran, and the override itself is free.
• A rerun is an extraction and is charged like one, which is the argument for scoping reruns to a selection.
• Rows backed by bundles cost more — every document in the bundle is read. The first three come with the column’s rate and each one after that adds to the cell. The cost preview totals it before you run. See bundles.

Rates are identical at every tier. Tiers gate capacity, never price — see tiers and limits.

Buying credits

Credits are prepaid and there is no subscription. Signing up comes with 500 free credits — 500 pages of reading, which is enough to put a real set of documents through. After that the minimum purchase is $10, larger amounts earn bonus credits on the whole purchase, and any amount above $20 can be entered directly.

The bands are published on pricing, along with a calculator. What matters in the application is that a purchase adds a lot to your balance immediately, including its bonus.

Lots, and why the balance is not one number

Credits arrive in lots — a purchase, a bonus, the signup grant — each with its own expiry, and they are spent oldest first. Credits expire twelve months from purchase.

So a balance of 12,000 credits is not one number with one deadline, and the usage page breaks out what is expiring when. Your home page raises it only when something is close enough to matter. The terms are in the credits policy.

What a run will cost, before it runs

Every place that starts charged work says what it will cost first. Select cells and the toolbar quotes the run; the “run all” dialog on a bundle states real credits; a single rerun from the citations panel does the same. When the balance covers it the quote is a quiet line of text, and when it does not, it says how short you are.

It is a quote and it says about, deliberately. The per-cell rates are exact, but a bundle can gain a document between the quote and the run, and some answers take a metered surcharge for the extra work of grounding them. Treat it as an upper bound you should recognise rather than a figure to reconcile.

A run you cannot fully afford still starts. It extracts what the balance covers and stops there, which is better than refusing work that would have succeeded — the quote is an upper bound, after all. Only a balance of zero disables anything, and there it also stops an upload before the file is sent, since reading is charged by the page and the job is doomed either way.

When the balance runs out

Credits are spent by jobs rather than by anyone clicking, so a long run can reach zero partway through. The cells it could not pay for are not failures and are not described as any:

• They are badged Out of credits or Spend cap in the grid, which are different problems with different fixes — a cap is not solved by buying more.
• They collect on your home page as Not run, ahead of genuinely failed cells, so a table stops reporting forty failures for what is one unpaid invoice.
• Nothing already extracted is lost, and the blocked cells were never charged.

Topping up picks the work back up. Rows that never ran at all are handed back to the table and answered without anyone pressing Run. A row that got halfway is yours to rerun — select it and run the scope, see running and reruns. Cells stopped by a spend cap are left alone by a purchase, because a purchase does not lift a cap; those re-arm when the calendar month turns or when you raise it.

Everyone can see the balance, not only owners and admins — the person who hits the wall is usually not the person who can fix it, and the prompt says “top up” or “ask an admin” accordingly.

Two controls worth setting early

Both of these are about not arriving at that point in the first place. They are on the billing page and both are off until you set them:

• A low-balance alert. An email when the balance dips below a level you choose. It arrives once per dip and re-arms when the balance recovers, so it does not become noise.
• A monthly spend cap. A ceiling on credits consumed in a calendar month, enforced at every debit — so topping up does not lift it. That is the point of it, and it is the control you want before turning on auto mode across a team.

What is free

Creating workspaces and tables, writing and editing columns, hiding columns, overriding cells, duplicating a table with its existing answers, sharing a workspace, inviting people, and exporting. None of it re-reads a document or re-answers a cell, so none of it costs anything.