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ScrapeGraphAI uses a credit system to measure API usage. Each successful API call consumes a number of credits depending on the service and the complexity of the request.

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Credit costs per service

ServiceCredits per request
SmartScraper1
SearchScraper5
Markdownify1
SmartCrawler1 per page crawled
Sitemap1
AgenticScraperVariable
Failed requests and requests that return an error are not charged.

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Checking your credit balance

Log in to the dashboard to see:
  • Remaining credits for your current billing period
  • Usage history broken down by service and date
You can also query your balance programmatically: 
from scrapegraph_py import Client

client = Client(api_key="your-api-key")
credits = client.get_credits()
print(f"Remaining credits: {credits['remaining']}")

import { getCredits } from "scrapegraph-js";

const credits = await getCredits("your-api-key");
console.log(`Remaining credits: ${credits.remaining}`);

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What happens when you run out of credits?

When your credits are exhausted, the API returns an HTTP 402 Payment Required response: 
{
  "error": "insufficient_credits",
  "message": "You have run out of credits. Please upgrade your plan or wait for the next billing cycle."
}
Upgrade your plan or purchase additional credits from the dashboard.

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Tips to reduce credit usage

  • Cache results for URLs that don’t change frequently to avoid re-scraping.
  • Use Markdownify instead of SmartScraper when you only need the page content in a readable format and don’t need structured extraction.
  • Limit crawl depth in SmartCrawler by setting max_pages to avoid accidentally crawling more pages than needed.