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-Unit Cost — Each API has its own credit cost (see table below). Document Extraction, Website Extraction, and Document to Markdown use page-based pricing.
3. Priority Consumption — Credits are consumed in this order:
   • Trial credits (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 100 trial credits across all APIs during the 7-day paid trial. Trial credits are:

• Granted after trial checkout completes
• Shared across all APIs
• Consumed before subscription credits
• Expired when the trial ends or you start full billing early

Page-Based Pricing

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

• 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.
• Website Extraction counts each website as 1 page-equivalent.

Embedded content processed as part of a single file, such as images inside a DOCX, is included in that file’s page-equivalent. Separately submitted files and email attachments count separately. Website Extraction counts the fetched page as 1 page-equivalent; referenced page assets are not billed separately unless you submit them as separate files.

Approximate Costs for Common Page Sizes

These examples assume each input page consumes 1 credit. Pay as you go examples use the first graduated tier for each currency.

EUR

USD

GBP

CHF

NOK

SEK

DKK

PLN

CZK

Pricing Plans

Choosing a Billing Model

Credits help you budget the whole workflow, not just individual API calls. Estimate the monthly cost of a workflow, then compare it with the manual time saved, backlog removed, delivery speed gained, errors avoided, and client margin protected. Choose the billing model that best matches how predictable that workflow is.

• Use subscriptions when the workflow is recurring and monthly volume is predictable.
• Use Pay as you go when volume varies by client, campaign, batch, or project.
• Use Enterprise when the workflow needs dedicated capacity, implementation support, contractual guarantees, or predictable turnaround for sensitive work.

Trial

The trial is a paid 7-day evaluation with 100 trial credits. Trial checkout prices are fixed per billing currency:

Trial credits are consumed before subscription credits and Pay as you go usage. You can use them across any API during the trial week, so a mixed workflow can combine extraction, transformation, and generation from the same credit pool.

When the trial ends, billing continues on the plan you selected at checkout. If you selected Pay as you go, the same Stripe customer, subscription, and metered billing setup continue and future successful API usage is billed from the normal Pay as you go meter.

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.

Your billing currency is fixed when you start paid billing and is used for subscriptions, pay-as-you-go charges, renewals, and plan changes. Website pricing may be displayed in a different currency based on location, but existing billing always uses the stored billing currency for your organization.

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 × €0.0800) + (1,500 × €0.0740) + (500 × €0.0680) = €225.00, or (1,000 × $0.0990) + (1,500 × $0.0920) + (500 × $0.0850) = $279.50.

The 7-day trial includes 100 trial credits before paid Pay as you go usage starts.

Enterprise

Enterprise pricing is for dedicated capacity with implementation support and a 3-month minimum commitment. For budgeting, reference prices for a dedicated capacity block of about 50,000 credits per month are:

Equivalent Pay as you go cost is shown for comparison only. Enterprise pricing is based on isolated capacity, dedicated infrastructure, support, contractual requirements, and workload mix, not shared pay-as-you-go credit rates.

Final Enterprise sizing depends on workload mix across APIs, required turnaround time, GPU capacity, hosting isolation, support needs, compliance requirements, and capacity buffer.

Partner Program Discounts

Approved partner program members can earn an additional discount on Pay as you go usage only. Partner discounts do not apply to monthly subscription plans or subscription credits.

Partner discounts are based on active client projects in the current billing period:

An active project is a project with at least 2,500 credits consumed in the current billing period. Partner discounts are applied to the Pay as you go subscription in Stripe after partner approval and tier sync.

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.

Payment Methods

We support the following payment methods:

• Credit Cards (Mastercard, Visa, American Express)
• SEPA direct debit
• Apple Pay
• iDEAL
• Stripe Link

SEPA Direct Debit

SEPA Direct Debit is a delayed-settlement payment method. When you start paid billing with SEPA, the subscription enters a pending state first. During that period:

• You can use up to 500 credits before the first SEPA payment fully settles.
• Full subscription access is unlocked only after Stripe, our payment provider, confirms settlement.
• If the initial SEPA settlement fails, API access is suspended immediately, provisional subscription credits are revoked, remaining trial credits are expired, and SEPA is disabled for future checkout sessions on that organization. Support must manually review and unban the account before access is restored.

Organizations that were previously suspended after a failed SEPA settlement can still use card-based checkout, but SEPA remains unavailable.

See Account Policies for the full suspension and manual review policy.

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.

For organizations waiting on their first SEPA settlement, the temporary 500-credit provisional cap applies before the normal Pay as you go credit-limit logic.

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"
}

Provisional Credit Limit Exceeded

If an organization is still waiting on its first SEPA settlement and tries to go beyond the 500-credit provisional allowance, requests return:

{
  "success": false,
  "error": "Provisional credit limit 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.