Billing and credits
Prepaid credits, the three price tiers, what is free, how reservations and refunds work, and auto-recharge.
SightRadar is prepaid. You buy credits, billable calls draw them down, and there is no subscription or minimum. 1 credit = $0.00001, so 100,000 credits are one dollar. Current USD rates and a cost calculator are on the pricing page.
Per photo processed, never per face
A photo with zero or five faces is one charge. Almost every endpoint processes exactly one photo per request, so in practice you pay per request. The one exception is POST /v1/compare, which takes two images and is charged for each image it actually processes; a side passed as a precomputed embedding is free.
Tiers
| Tier | Applies to | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time | every synchronous face call: index, search, selfie registration, detect, compare | 93 per photo |
| Search by face id | search-by-id against a registered selfie | 62 per search |
| Batch | POST /v1/batches, deferrable and URL-only | 62 per photo |
| Storage | stored faceprints | billed daily per million stored faces |
Control-plane calls are free: collections, wallet, usage, keys, webhooks, batch status. They still need a valid key.
Reserve, settle, refund
Each billable call reserves its credits up front, settles on success, and refunds if the engine fails. You are never charged for a 4xx or 5xx. A successful call with no faces in the image is a settled charge.
When storage is charged
Storage is charged once a day, for the day before. Your stored faces are counted after each UTC day ends, and that day's charge leaves your wallet early the next UTC day, usually by 03:00 UTC (08:30 IST). So yesterday's storage can read $0 for the first few hours of each UTC day, and your transaction history shows each storage charge one day after the day it covers. The Usage → Storage tab lists each day with the time it was charged.
Running out
When the wallet hits zero, billable calls return 402 Payment Required and control-plane calls keep working. Every billable response carries X-Credits-Remaining so you can watch the balance inline, and GET /v1/wallet returns it on demand.
Batch photos that failed on insufficient_credits are not lost: after topping up, requeue them in one preview-then-execute call.
Auto-recharge
In Billing you can set a threshold and a top-up amount. When the balance falls below the threshold, the wallet is topped up automatically against the payment mandate you authorised. The same settings are readable and writable over the API at GET/PUT /portal/auto-recharge. The minimum top-up is $10.
Idempotent retries are free
Send an Idempotency-Key header on billable calls. A replay under the same key is never re-charged and never re-runs the model. See core concepts for what each operation returns on replay.
Watching spend
GET /v1/usageaggregates calls and credits per operation over the last N days.GET /v1/usage/dailyreturns a dense daily time series, operations and storage as separate series, ready for charting.- The console's Usage page renders both.
Refunds
There are no monetary refunds; verified billing errors are corrected as wallet credits. The full policy is at /refund.