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A Contents download is priced by what it returns. A card CSV export carries a flat per-export baseline plus a per-row rate. A web page extraction is a flat per-page rate. Every price below is also readable from the API before you fetch, so you never have to infer a bill from this page.

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What a card CSV export costs

rows is the number of rows the export actually returns, which is the smaller of max_rows and the rows the card holds. Every returned row is billed, from the first, and a card with fewer rows than your cap bills only the rows it returns.

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A worked example

A 2,000-row card at the base rate, exported in full:
The same card from a premium source that bills $0.10 per 1,000 rows:

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Read your exact rate before you fetch

Do not assume the floor rate. Every downloadable card in a Search or Answer response carries an export_pricing object, and its row_cpm_usd is that card’s rate for your account — already adjusted for the card’s source and for any negotiated terms on your account:
Put those numbers into the formula above and you get the charge exactly. That is the reliable way to price an export — a rate table on a docs page cannot account for per-source rates or per-account terms, and export_pricing can.
export_pricing also carries a deprecated free_rows field, always 0. Ignore it; it will be removed.

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Quote without fetching

Send quote_only: true on a Contents request to price an export without retrieving it or being charged. You get the cost back with no content and no charge. Search and Answer have no equivalent — see Search inline contents vs. the Contents API.

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How max_rows drives the bill

max_rows is the single field that decides the size of a card export, so it is the field that decides the bill. Set max_rows when you need a slice. A 50-row preview of a premium card costs $0.006 where the full 2,000 rows cost $0.201.
On Search and Answer, max_rows is a per-card cap. A response holding five cards bills each one separately, each with its own baseline.

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What bounds a multi-card search response

One search response cannot bill without limit, however many cards it holds. All cards share a budget of 2,000 billable rows, spent in card order, so a 20-card request at max_rows: 2000 does not bill 40,000 rows. Once the budget is spent, later cards still return a small preview rather than nothing — they are not dropped, and they still carry their own export_pricing so you can fetch the rest through Contents. truncated and total_rows tell you when this happened: a card can come back with fewer rows than you asked for because the budget ran out, not because the card was small.

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Search inline contents vs. the Contents API

Card data reaches you two ways, priced identically per row but shaped very differently: Both charge the same per-export baseline and per-row rate, so the difference in cost is entirely the difference in rows.
quote_only is Contents-only. There is no way to price a Search or Answer response before running it. If you need a quote, read export_pricing off the card and compute it, or call Contents with quote_only: true.
The small inline default is deliberate: a search response can hold many cards, and each one bills separately, so a /contents-sized default would multiply the bill by the number of cards in the response. Reach for inline contents when you want a usable preview alongside the results, and for the Contents API when you want the card’s full data.

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What a web page extraction costs

Text extraction from a web page is a flat $0.001 per page. max_rows does not apply — it has no rows.

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Where to find what you were charged

  • Per item — every ContentItem carries a cost in USD: what that one download cost.
  • Per request — when your account is billed pay-as-you-go, the response carries a usage object whose total_cost_usd is the request total. (usage.data is only the inline-data component, and is omitted when a request inlined none.) On accounts that are not metered per request the usage key is absent; that is expected, and the per-item cost fields are still populated.