Credits and data costs

Keyword research, Google results, rank checks, backlinks and AI visibility all need paid search data. How you pay for it depends on your plan.

Monthly plans: credits

Monthly plans include the data, as credits, so there's no account to set up. One credit is a tenth of a US cent.

Unused credits roll over while your plan is active. If you run out mid-month, buy a pack on the Billing page ($10 for 8,000 credits, also $25 and $50), or move to a bigger plan, which works out cheaper per credit.

Lifetime deal: your own DataForSEO account

The lifetime deal runs on your own DataForSEO account. Add its login in Settings → Connections → DataForSEO and every search is billed to it, at DataForSEO's prices with nothing added by us. The sidebar shows what you've spent this month and your remaining DataForSEO balance. When the balance runs out, the app keeps working; it fetches new data again once you top up.

What things cost

The pricing page lists everyday actions with their cost, from averages of real use. The app also shows the cost next to each button before you run anything: in dollars on your own key, in credits on a monthly plan.

Rules of thumb:

• Keyword research is about 2 cents (26 credits) per seed keyword.
• Rank tracking is about a fifth of a cent (3 credits) per keyword per check.
• AI visibility is the heaviest: one question asked of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity is about 15 cents (192 credits).
• Site audits crawl for free; only the page-speed checks on a sample of pages cost anything.

Free

These never cost anything:

• Search Console, Google Analytics, Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow, which read your own data.
• Repeating the same search within 24 hours, which is served from cache.
• Your projects, saved keywords, reports and anything already fetched.

Over MCP

AI agents spend the same way through the MCP tools: on your DataForSEO account on a lifetime licence, from your credits on a monthly plan.