Credits: what research costs and how the monthly allowance works

Credits pay for research that uses Serpkin's search data: keyword ideas, live search results, competitor research, keyword gaps, estimated rankings, AI answer checks, content briefs and backlink refreshes. Everything that reads your own site, your missions, your results or your Search Console data is included. This page lists the exact costs, how the monthly allowance works, and what happens when you run out.

#What uses credits

Credits are spent per operation, at fixed prices, so you can estimate a research session before your agent starts it. The prices below come from the same table the server charges against.

A few examples make the arithmetic concrete. Keyword research for one seed phrase costs 2 credits. Analyzing three keywords costs 3. Finding gaps against two competitors costs 6. A visibility check for five queries costs 5. A single content brief costs 2.

#What is included

Most of what Serpkin does every day does not touch your credits. These are included on every plan:

• Site scans and missions: the crawl, the analysis and every mission Serpkin creates.
• Verification and measurement: checking a mission on a preview or in production, then the 14 and 28 day results.
• Site watch and competitor watch: the regular checks, alerts, early wins and the weekly email.
• Search Console: connecting it, syncing queries and pages, and URL inspections.
• Rank tracking: tracked keywords are checked on your plan's cadence at no credit cost.
• Monthly snapshots: estimated rankings, AI visibility and backlinks refresh on their own each month without spending credits.
• AI content reviews: these have their own monthly allowance, separate from credits.

Reading is always free. Opening a saved content brief, viewing a stored snapshot or asking for the weekly summary costs nothing. Only an explicit refresh that calls the search data provider spends credits.

#Your monthly allowance

The allowance resets on the 1st of each month at 00:00 UTC, on both monthly and yearly billing. Unused credits do not roll over, so there is no reason to hoard them. Your Account page shows the reset date in your local format and the exact number left.

Because reservations are visible, the number on your Account page can be lower than the number of credits you have actually spent. The page separates used credits from credits reserved for running research, so a slow job never looks like a mysterious charge.

#Check your balance

In the app, open Account. The Credits panel shows remaining credits, the monthly total, a usage meter, the cost table and the operations that are included. Reserved credits appear next to used credits while a job is running. From a terminal, npx serpkin status prints the site, ownership, data level, next mission and credits in one view.

Your agent can see the same numbers. Serpkin's MCP instructions tell it to read free data first, state the cost before spending credits, and ask you before a research operation. If you ask for something expensive, a well-behaved agent will say what it costs and wait.

#When you run out

Research that would cost more than you have is refused before it starts, with a plain message: how many credits it needs, how many remain and the date they reset. The HTTP status is 402, and the error code is CREDITS_EXHAUSTED. Nothing partial is charged, and the rest of Serpkin keeps working: scans, missions, site watch, verification and Search Console are unaffected.

A monthly safety cap can also pause research for the rest of the month. It exists to stop a runaway loop from producing a large provider bill. You see the same kind of message with the resume date, and your existing data, missions and checks continue.

#Failed research and refunds

Credits are charged when the work succeeds. If a job fails before the provider is called, or fails definitely after a call, the reservation is released and nothing is charged. If a call finished but its result never arrived, the credits stay charged, because the provider did the work. That case is rare, and the job history shows it as an uncertain dispatch rather than a clean failure.

Retrying a failed operation is safe. Each request carries an idempotency key, so a retry that reaches the server twice is treated as one request. If you see a charge you cannot explain, open the job in Account and check its status and timestamps before contacting support.

#Spend less without losing coverage

What credits do not buy

Credits are not a ranking guarantee, a traffic promise or a substitute for shipping the work. They buy data that makes a mission specific: the query, the page, the gap and the check. The change still has to be made in your repository and deployed by you.

If you need more research than your plan includes, upgrade in Billing. Plan limits, including credits, are listed together in Plans and limits.