Credits & Pricing

Iteration Layer uses a unified credit pool across all APIs. Every API request consumes credits from your organization’s shared balance.

Credits

How Credits Work

1. Unified Pool — Credits are shared across all APIs
2. Per-Request Cost — Each API has its own credit cost (see table below). Document Extraction and Document to Markdown use page-based pricing.
3. Priority Consumption — Credits are consumed in this order:
   • Trial credits (API-specific, consumed first)
   • Subscription credits (from your plan)
   • Pay As You Go overage (if auto overage is enabled or on a pay-as-you-go plan)

Credit Costs per API

How Trial Credits Work

Every organization receives 1,750 trial credits across all APIs — worth $60 / €75 at pay-as-you-go rates. Trial credits are:

• Automatically granted on first use of each API
• Scoped to a specific API
• Consumed before subscription credits
• Expired when you subscribe to a plan (not expired for Pay As You Go)

Page-Based Pricing

Document Extraction and Document to Markdown use page-based pricing. The credit cost depends on the total number of pages in the input files.

• Images (PNG, JPEG, WebP, HEIF, GIF, SVG) count as 1 page each.
• PDFs are counted by their actual page count.
• DOCX, XLSX, CSV, TXT, HTML, MD, JSON each count as 1 page regardless of length.
• Document Extraction sums pages across all files in the request (up to 20 files per request).
• Document to Markdown accepts a single file per request.

Approximate Costs for Common Page Sizes

Pricing Plans

Subscription Plans

Your subscription renews monthly on the same day you first subscribed. For example, if you subscribe on April 11, you’ll be billed on May 11, June 11, and so on. For months that don’t have your anniversary day (e.g., Feb 30), billing falls on the last day of the month.

Pay As You Go

No monthly commitment. Use any API and get billed at the end of each month based on actual usage. Volume discounts are applied automatically using graduated pricing tiers:

Graduated pricing means each tier applies only to the credits within that range. For example, 3,000 credits would cost: (1,000 × $0.0330) + (1,500 × $0.0302) + (500 × $0.0254) = $90.00.

Trial credits are included with Pay As You Go, just like subscriptions.

Auto Overage

Subscribers can enable auto overage to automatically bill excess usage via pay-as-you-go rates when their plan credits run out. Toggle this in the Billing dashboard. Overage credits are billed at the same graduated rates as Pay As You Go.

Billing Controls

Pay-as-you-go Usage Limits

Every organization has a per-period pay-as-you-go credit limit that prevents runaway charges. New organizations start at 15,000 credits per period. When the limit is reached, an invoice is triggered automatically for usage so far, and you can continue using the API immediately.

As invoices are paid successfully, the limit increases by 20% each time, up to a maximum of 1,000,000 credits. If an invoice payment fails, the limit resets to 15,000. If you need a higher limit, request it through the billing dashboard or contact us.

Project Budget Caps

Set a per-project budget cap to limit how many credits all API keys in a project can consume per billing period. This prevents runaway usage from a single client or integration.

Errors

402 Payment Required

When your credit balance reaches zero, API requests return a 402 Payment Required error:

{
  "success": false,
  "error": "Insufficient credits",
  "billing_url": "https://app.iterationlayer.com/billing"
}

Pay As You Go users do not hit this error — usage is billed in arrears.

To resolve this:

1. Switch to Pay As You Go for usage-based billing
2. Subscribe to a plan for recurring credits
3. Enable auto overage on your subscription to prevent future interruptions

Budget Cap Exceeded

If a project’s budget cap is reached, requests with any key in that project return:

{
  "success": false,
  "error": "Budget cap exceeded"
}

Refunds

Money-Back Guarantee

All subscription plans come with a 14-day money-back guarantee. If you’re not satisfied, request a refund within 14 days of purchase or renewal. Credits consumed during that period will be deducted from the refund amount. Pay As You Go charges are for usage already consumed and are non-refundable.

For full details, see our Refund Policy.

Automatic Refunds for Failed Requests

Credits are automatically refunded for any failed request, whether the failure was a client error (4xx) or a server error (5xx). No action is needed on your part. Validation failures, malformed payloads, missing parameters, and internal errors all refund the credits that were reserved for the request. This applies to both synchronous and async webhook requests.

For async webhook requests, credits are not refunded when processing completed successfully but webhook delivery to your endpoint fails — the work was done and the result was generated.