Understand prepaid credits, what each operation costs, tiers, and provisioned browsers.
Expand runs on prepaid credits. You buy credits upfront, and delivered work draws them down. 1,000 credits cost $1, and one successful Fetch costs one credit.
Open Billing. The Billing view in your dashboard, for your credit balance and Buy credits.
View Usage. The Usage view in your dashboard, for request activity over time.
Read Tiers.Tiers, for tier qualification rules and worked examples.
Need more browser capacity before your tier unlocks? Add provisioned browsers for $1 per browser per month and they apply immediately. See Browser concurrency.
Credit costs
Every priced operation is quoted in credits. 1,000 credits cost $1, so one credit is a tenth of a cent.
Operation
Credits
Notes
Successful Fetch
1
Main content retrieval. The baseline unit.
Highlights
1
Called Fetch Search on some technical surfaces; docs say Highlights. Added on top of the Fetch.
Converted document page
per page
This is credit and usage based, not token based. Expand's value is that agents answer more questions with fewer tokens, but you pay per delivered output, not per token.
Credits and balance
Your organization holds a single prepaid credit balance. Delivered work draws it down; buying credits tops it up.
Your first organization starts with 10,000 welcome credits, worth $10. Welcome credits expire 365 days after the grant. Anonymous landing and demo usage runs on separate demo credits and does not touch your balance.
Billing shows your balance as:
Available credits. Credits you can spend now.
Expiring soon. Credits set to expire within 30 days.
Buy more with Buy credits. Choose the number of credits — any multiple of 1,000, up to 10,000,000 — and finish in a secure hosted checkout that collects your card. Purchased credits land on your balance and stay there until you spend them.
Usage metering
A normal Fetch costs one credit. If you ask for Highlights, that adds a credit. If the URL serves a document rather than a page, the pages it converts are charged on top.
Each requested output is charged independently:
What you fetch
Credits
A page for Main Markdown
1
A page with Highlights
2
An office file, ebook, CSV, JSON, XML, or text file
1. These convert locally and add nothing
A PDF with a usable text layer
plus one credit per converted page
We charge document conversion only on a delivered result. A fetch refused for exceeding a limit, for an unconvertible format, or because the origin returned an error is charged nothing at all.
Document fetches charge every delivered page at the rates above. Set documentConfig.maxPages to limit the pages a fetch may convert. There is no default page limit. Set documentConfig.ocr to "never" to skip vision-model processing. See Documents.
View request activity over time in the Usage view of your dashboard. The credit costs on this page are the source of truth for what you are charged. The Usage view is for inspecting request activity.
What you are charged for, by outcome
You pay for delivered content, not for attempts. Every Fetch places a credit hold up front and releases it when the request settles, so a request that produced nothing costs nothing.
Outcome
Charged
Why
The page was captured
Yes
Content was delivered.
The origin responded with an HTTP error status (400 and above) and content was captured
Yes
Error pages are still content — soft-404s, maintenance notices, status dashboards. You receive the document plus an originError describing the status.
The origin could not be reached, refused the document, or exceeded the redirect limit
The second row is the one worth internalizing: an origin's 404 or 500 page is a real capture, so it costs a credit like any other page. Check originError on the response before treating the content as authoritative. See Error Handling for the exact field and the full status taxonomy.
Highlights are charged on the same basis — requested and delivered snippets cost a credit; a request that never produced a capture costs nothing.
Browser concurrency
Browser concurrency is how many browser sessions can run at once. It comes from two parts:
Total browser concurrency = base tier concurrency + provisioned browsers
Tier overview
Your tier sets your included base browser concurrency. Tiers increase as you meet cumulative spend and elapsed-time thresholds.
Tier
Qualification
Base browser concurrency
0
Default
2
1
$10 cumulative spend
5
2
$50 cumulative spend + 7 days since first transaction
Every tier above 0 has a spend threshold; tiers 2 and up also require the elapsed time. See Tiers for qualification rules, tier-up timing, and worked examples.
Provisioned browser concurrency
Tiers increase your included base browser concurrency over time. If you need more capacity now, add provisioned browsers in Billing. Each one costs $1 per month, billed monthly to the card on file. This is a fixed subscription price, not a credit cost, and it is added on top of your tier limit.
Total browser concurrency = base tier concurrency + provisioned browsers
Change
When it takes effect
What you pay
Adding browsers
Immediately
Charged pro rata for the rest of the current month right away, then $1 per browser per month
Removing browsers
End of the paid month
The browsers you paid for stay until the month ends, then the smaller count applies; nothing is refunded
Setting the count to zero
End of the paid month
If your organization has no card on file yet, Billing sends you to a hosted checkout first and the browsers appear once the payment is confirmed.
Use provisioned browsers when you need predictable parallel throughput before tier progression catches up. Batched Fetch and live Fetch both queue under your browser session limit. Enterprise organizations get their browser concurrency from their contract instead and do not buy browsers here.
Access when credits run out
Expand checks that your balance covers a request's hold before it admits the request. If your organization has enough credits, Fetch runs. If it does not, usage is blocked until you buy more.
A balance that covers the hold allows usage.
A balance that does not is refused before any work starts, so you are never charged for a request Expand declined to run.
Buying credits clears the block immediately.
Blocks follow your credit balance. A single failed card charge does not by itself disable access.
Every page a document fetch converts. An image counts as one page. On top of the Fetch.
Vision-model page
5 per page
A page read by a vision model instead of a text layer, such as a scanned PDF or any image. On top of the converted page.
Video
5 per video
A video fetch that delivered a transcript. The cost does not change with length. On top of the Fetch.
Transcribed audio
10 per minute
Rounded up, one-minute minimum. Applies to audio files, and to videos with no caption track.
Crawl page render
1 per page
A crawl page Expand actually rendered. A crawl freshness probe is free.
Failed, blocked, or empty work
0
Nothing was delivered, so nothing is charged.
Browser concurrency
Not credits
Included base tier plus optional provisioned browsers at $1 per browser per month, billed by card. See Browser concurrency.
Enterprise / volume
Custom
Committed allocation, bulk rate, and enterprise terms. Contact sales.
1
A scanned PDF, or any image
1 plus one credit per page plus five credits per vision-model page
An audio file
1 plus ten credits per transcribed minute
A YouTube video with captions
6 — the Fetch plus the video
A YouTube video with no captions
6 plus ten credits per transcribed minute
No
No document was delivered. Network-origin outcomes return 200; document refusals return FetchOriginHttpError at 404 or 410 for missing or removed documents, and 502 otherwise. Both release the hold.
The page blocked the capture (403 FetchBlocked)
No
Expand did not deliver the page.
The page exceeded Expand's size limits (413 FetchPageTooLarge)
No
Expand did not deliver the page.
Expand-side failure (500, 503)
No
Our problem, not your charge.
A crawl freshness probe
No
An internal check, never a delivered page.
10
3
$200 cumulative spend + 14 days since first transaction
20
4
$500 cumulative spend + 30 days since first transaction
50
5
$1000 cumulative spend + 60 days since first transaction
100
Nothing more; the browsers you already paid for stay until the month ends