We’d like to share a quick clarification regarding how billing works when search engines return fewer or more than 10 results per page (default depth) in the Organic SERP APIs. For example, Yahoo may display 5 results on the first page, while Bing can show up to 50. Our billing system is designed to account for this varying behavior, while helping you get complete results and minimize costs.
How it works
- Base price. As we’ve mentioned earlier, the base price covers the first page of results, that is up to 10 results (the typical amount we see per page).
- Fewer than 10 results per page. If a page itself contains fewer than 10 results and more pages are needed to reach the specified
depth, additional charges apply with a 25% discount for the next pages. - More than 10 results per page. If a page contains more than 10 results (e.g. 30), and you set
depthto 10 or ignore this field, you will receive all the results that page displays (30 in this example) at no additional cost. - Refunds for extra pages. When you set
depthto 14, you are initially billed for two pages, but if a single page contains all 14 results once it’s fetched, the charge for the extra page(s) is automatically refunded to your account balance.
How to limit crawling and reduce costs
To ensure your API requests are optimized for the most cost-effective outcome, you can use the max_crawl_pages parameter. It simply limits the number of pages to crawl.
Example:
➤ Request with “depth”: 15. Page 1 shows 14 results, Page 2 shows 10 → you receive 15 results and you are billed for 2 pages (base + 75% of the base).
➤ Request with “depth”: 15 and "max_crawl_pages": 1. Only Page 1 is crawled, the API returns 14 results → you are billed the base price only.
You can learn more about using max_crawl_pages on our help center.
We hope this makes things clearer and helps you optimize your usage more effectively.