Credits and billing

Every product spends from one universal credit balance. This page is the full set of rules for when a lookup costs credits and when it does not.

Credits per product

Each product has a fixed price in credits per unit. The prices below are read from the catalog.

Plan prices are on the pricing page.

Plans, the trial and top-ups

• Plans. Starter $99 a month for 20,000 credits; Growth $299 a month for 85,000 credits; Professional $799 a month for 250,000 credits; Enterprise $1,999 a month for 1,000,000 credits. Credits are not sold without a plan.
• The trial. Starter, Growth and Professional each start with a 7-day trial that costs $1 at signup, paid by card, and allows 100 credits. One trial is given per card. If you use all 100 credits before the trial ends, lookups pause with a trial_allowance_exhausted error and nothing is charged until you choose "Start my plan now" on the billing page. When the 7 days end, the plan starts and your card is charged for the first month unless you cancel first. Enterprise has no trial.
• Roll-over. Each month of plan credits stays spendable for 3 months after it arrives. The oldest credits are spent first.
• Top-ups. A subscriber can add 10,000 credits at the rate of their plan (Starter $49.50, Growth $35.18, Professional $31.96, Enterprise $19.99). Top-up credits stay valid for 12 months.
• Refunds. A first paid month can be refunded when you ask within 7 days of the payment. Refunds are handled by a person, who reviews each request: write to hello@lookvalid.com.
• Enterprise. Enterprise starts at $1,999 a month for 1,000,000 credits and is set up on a call, with larger volumes quoted there: book a call.

Success billing

Most products use success billing: you are charged only when the lookup finds something. If the number is not valid, the domain is not registered or the page cannot be read, the response says found: false, credits_charged is 0, and your balance does not change.

A few products use per-call billing: every completed lookup is charged, found or not. The table above shows which rule each product follows, and each reference page repeats it.

Repeat lookups are free

Results are cached per account for 7 days. When you repeat a lookup with the same input inside that window:

• you get the stored result back with cache_hit: true,
• credits_charged is 0,
• the data source is not called again.

The cache belongs to your account. Another account that runs the same lookup pays for its own first one. After 7 days the entry expires and the next lookup is a fresh one. The cache object in every response shows cached_at and expires_at.

Inputs are normalized before caching, so trivial differences such as letter case or surrounding spaces do not count as a new lookup.

What is never charged

• Requests with invalid input (HTTP 400).
• Requests rejected for a missing or bad key (401), a rate limit (429) or a body that is too large (413).
• Lookups that fail because the data source is unavailable (503) or because of an internal error (500).
• Lookups refused because the balance is too low (402).
• The account and usage endpoints.

How a charge happens

1. The API checks the cache. A hit is returned free.
2. Otherwise it reserves the product's price from your available balance. If you cannot cover it, you get insufficient_credits and the data source is never called.
3. The lookup runs.
4. If it found something, the reservation becomes a charge. If it did not, the reservation is released (success billing) or charged (per-call billing). Errors always release it.

Credits reserved by lookups still running are shown as reserved in your balance and come back if those lookups find nothing.

See what you were charged

• Each response carries credits_charged and credits_remaining, also sent as the X-Credits-Charged and X-Credits-Remaining headers.
• GET /v1/account returns your granted, spent, reserved and available credits.
• GET /v1/usage counts requests, cache hits and credits per product for a date range.

Tips to spend less

• Cache results on your side too when you need them for longer than 7 days.
• Do not retry a found: false result: it will return the same answer, free, until the cache expires.
• Use the reference pages to see exactly which input each product bills on.