Billing & Credits

TrackSERPs uses a fair, transparent billing philosophy: reading data is free within your plan allowance; credits are spent only when Google rank checks actually execute.

The Core Billing Rules

• Reads are free: Reading projects, locations, latest rankings, historical movements, and volume costs 0 credits. They are bounded only by your plan's monthly call quota.
• Credits are spent on checks: One check credit covers 1 keyword × 1 device × 1 location down to rank 100 on Google. Tracking multiple URLs for the same keyword costs no additional credits.
• Write endpoints declare costs in advance: Every endpoint that creates scheduled scans or runs checks informs you of the credit impact before or during execution.

Dry Runs: Estimate Before You Run

When triggering a manual check run with POST /projects/:id/runs, add ?dry_run=true to calculate the required credits and projected balance without starting a job or deducting any credits:

curl -X POST "https://api.trackserps.com/v1/projects/proj_abc123/runs?dry_run=true" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ts_live_..." \
  -H "Accept: application/json"

The response indicates whether your account has sufficient credits to run the project:

{
  "would_hold": 42,
  "balance_after": 2408,
  "allowed": true,
  "reason": null
}

Keyword Addition Credit Estimation

When you add new keywords via POST /projects/:id/keywords, the API returns the project's estimated monthly credit consumption before and after the addition:

{
  "results": [
    { "status": "created", "keyword": { "id": "kw_123", "phrase": "rank tracker api" } }
  ],
  "estimated_monthly_credits": {
    "before": 2460,
    "after": 2520
  },
  "monthly_allowance": 3390
}

Monitoring Credit Balance & API Usage

Call GET /account/usage to check your remaining monthly plan credits, top-up balance, and billing period rollover date:

curl -X GET "https://api.trackserps.com/v1/account/usage" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ts_live_..." \
  -H "Accept: application/json"

{
  "credits": {
    "monthly_remaining": 2450,
    "monthly_allowance": 3390,
    "topup_remaining": 5000
  },
  "api": {
    "calls_this_month": 12400,
    "calls_allowance": 100000,
    "rate_limit_per_minute": 120
  },
  "period_end": "2026-12-01T00:00:00.000Z"
}