Credits and billing

How do Serpel credits work?

Every workspace has one credit balance. Credits pay for the work Serpel buys from data providers: live Google results for rank tracking, ChatGPT answers and Google AI Overviews for AI visibility, keyword data for keyword research and pages fetched by the site audit crawler. Everything else, including reading the results again, costs nothing.

Paid operations in a project use the balance of the workspace that owns the project. The same prices apply in the dashboard, the CLI, the REST API and over MCP.

Which operations use credits?

These are all operations that use credits. The prices come from the same price list that books every charge.

A scheduled rank check waits in the provider’s queue, which is why it costs less than a check right now. A monitoring run started by its schedule uses the scheduled price, a run you start by hand uses the price for right now. The monitoring guide explains schedules in detail.

What does a typical month cost?

A few examples, calculated with the current price list. The project settings show the same kind of forecast for your own schedule before you save it.

Check any price before you run something with serpel billing estimate or POST /billing/estimate. An estimate books nothing.

serpel billing estimate --operation rankCheck --keywords 50 --depth 50 --scheduled
serpel billing estimate --operation crawl --max-pages 250

How is a paid operation charged?

You are never charged more than the reserved maximum. Rank checks, AI checks and crawls charge per delivered item: if a provider fails for some keywords, those keywords cost nothing. Keyword research costs its fixed price once the research succeeds. A crawl reserves credits for the page limit of the project and charges only the pages it actually fetched. A reservation left behind by a failed job is released automatically after 30 minutes.

The Balance section under Settings → Billing shows what is available, the booked balance, what is reserved by running operations and how long your credits last at the current pace. Settings → Usage breaks down the last 30 days by feature, by project and by day. In the CLI, serpel billing balance shows the same numbers and serpel billing history lists the transactions.

Which plans are there?

You can use Serpel without a subscription and pay only for the credits you buy. A subscription adds monthly credits and raises the limits. The current prices are on the pricing page.

How do you subscribe, upgrade or downgrade?

1. 1

   Pick a plan.

   Open Settings → Billing and choose a plan under Plans. Payment runs on a Stripe Checkout page. Before every checkout you confirm that Serpel may start right away, which ends your right of withdrawal once the service has been fully provided.

2. 2

   Change the plan later.

   An upgrade takes effect immediately and starts a new billing period with the new monthly credits. It is charged in full from the day you switch, without a credit for the unused time, and the unused part of your current monthly credits stays on your balance. A smaller plan starts with the next period.

3. 3

   Manage payment details and invoices.

   The plan card links to the Stripe customer portal, where you update the payment method and download invoices. serpel billing portal opens the same portal.

serpel billing plan
serpel billing subscribe --plan starter --start-now
serpel billing change-plan --plan pro

Only the owner of a workspace can buy credits, start or change a subscription and redeem promo codes. Tokens and the CLI need the billing:write scope for these actions and billing:read to see the balance.

How do you top up credits?

Top-ups are one-time payments through Stripe and work with or without a subscription. Choose a package under Settings → Billing → Top up credits:

With the CLI or the API you can also pay a custom amount between €5 and €1,000, where one cent buys one credit. The CLI flag --amount takes cents, so --amount 1500 is €15 and buys 1,500 credits. The API field is amountCents.

serpel billing top-up --package credits1000 --start-now
serpel billing top-up --amount 1500 --start-now --no-open

What happens when credits or limits run out?

Each workspace also has a daily spending limit of 2,000 credits by default, counted across finished charges and open reservations for each day in UTC. Keyword research that would cross it is refused with HTTP 429 and budget_exceeded, and a queued job fails when it starts. serpel billing balance shows how much of today’s limit is used.

Can AI agents spend your credits?

Only if you allow it. Over MCP, the tool research_keywords is the only one that uses credits. It runs only on Starter or Pro, after the workspace owner switches on Agents and AI apps under Settings → Billing, and within a daily agent limit of 500 credits by default (adjustable up to 100,000). A single call costs at most 50 credits. The Claude Code guide covers the details.

serpel agents allow --daily-limit 200
serpel agents status

How do you redeem a promo code?

Enter the code under Settings → Billing → Promo code, or sign up through a link of the form https://serpel.app/signup?code=YOURCODE and the credits arrive when you confirm your email address. Codes use capital letters, digits and hyphens. Each promotion can be redeemed once per account, promo credits never expire and have no cash value. To stop guessing, a wrong code always gets the same message and attempts are rate-limited.

How do you cancel a subscription?

Open Settings → Billing and follow the link “Verträge hier kündigen” on the plan card, or go straight to the cancellation page. The German labels are required by German consumer law. The cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period and you get a confirmation email. Until then nothing changes. serpel billing cancel does the same from the command line, and serpel billing resume withdraws the cancellation before the period ends.

When the subscription ends, the remaining monthly credits expire, purchased and promo credits stay, and the limits of the free plan apply. Projects, keywords and prompts above those limits stay where they are. Their schedules pause and new checks are refused with plan_limit until you upgrade or remove items.

Which API endpoints handle billing?

The billing endpoints of the REST API mirror the dashboard. A summary of the balance, a price estimate and the transaction list need billing:read.

curl https://serpel.app/api/v1/billing/summary \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SERPEL_TOKEN"

curl -X POST https://serpel.app/api/v1/billing/estimate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SERPEL_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"operation":"crawl","params":{"maxPages":250}}'

Where to go next