# Credits and rate limits

## How are credits spent?

- Searching people or companies is free - you only spend credits when data is revealed.
- Revealing an email (People Search with `enrich_email: true`, People Enrich, Email Finder) costs
  **1 email credit** per email found.
- Revealing a phone number (People Search or People Enrich with `enrich_phone: true`) costs
  **1 phone credit** per result that has a LinkedIn URL to look up.
- Verifying an email (Email Verifier) costs **1 verifier credit** per verification.
- You are not charged when no result is found.

> **Cost control**
>
> Endpoints that can spend credits state it on their reference page. Search responses expose
> `email.status` and `mobile_phone.status` for free so you can decide what's worth revealing -
> the actual address or number is only included once you request it (or it was already revealed
> for your workspace).
>
> Once a workspace's credit balance reaches zero, credit-gated endpoints respond with
> `402 Payment Required` and set two response headers: `X-Limit-Reached: true` and
> `X-Limit-Type: credits`.

## Rate limits

Regular API keys are not rate-limited today - the practical limit is your credit balance: once it
reaches zero, credit-consuming endpoints respond with `402 Payment Required` instead (see above).

The one exception is the shared demo account: requests authenticated as the demo account are
capped at 1500 requests per hour (per requesting IP address) and get
`429 Too Many Requests` once the cap is exceeded. This does not apply to real workspace API keys.

Send requests at a reasonable pace and avoid unnecessary retries on success. This may change in
the future - contact support if you're planning very high sustained throughput.