cost fields on responses, and what happens when you run out. For current per-endpoint rates, see the Tako pricing page.
Credits
Tako meters API usage in credits: each request to Search, Answer, the Agent, and Contents deducts credits when it is served. Billing is pay-as-you-go: your account holds a credit balance, and each call draws down that balance based on the endpoint and the work it performs (for example, adeep-effort Search costs more than the default call).
The cost field
Some responses report a cost in US dollars so you can see what a piece of work cost:
- Search / Answer — each downloadable card carries a
contentdescriptor with acost(USD) for that card’s inlined content. - Contents — each
ContentItemcarries acost(USD) for that download.
$0.001 per export plus a per-row rate that starts at $0.01 per 1,000 rows and is higher for some premium sources; web-page text extraction bills $0.001 per page. Read the exact per-card rate from export_pricing before you fetch, and see Contents pricing for the formula and worked examples.
A cost of 0.0 is rare: it means the item was genuinely free — an empty payload, or an account whose row charges are waived. A card export you actually receive rows from is never 0.0, because the per-export baseline always applies. These fields report the USD cost of the underlying work; your credit balance is drawn down accordingly.
When your account is billed pay-as-you-go, the request total is
usage.total_cost_usd — always present on a metered response, and always
the sum of the components beside it. usage.data is only the inline-data
component and is omitted entirely when a request inlined none. On accounts
that are not metered per request the usage key is absent (not null);
sum the per-item cost values instead.Running out (402)
When your account is out of credits, API calls return 402 (insufficient balance). Top up your balance from your Tako account, then retry — requests succeed again once your balance is positive.