Credits and billing

The API is prepaid. You hold a balance of credits; each successful call deducts the credits that call costs. Your plan adds its credits every month: 1,000 on Starter, 10,000 on Business and 100,000 on Scale. A call through the MCP server costs exactly what it costs here. The app spends the same credits: a register extract, a document or, on the Free plan, a company profile costs 1, once per workspace; the current extract is free.

Credits are bought in the app under Settings › Plan & billing (Einstellungen › Plan & Abrechnung), at 7 cents each without a plan, 6 cents on Starter, 1.8 cents on Business and 0.6 cents on Scale, net. Credits you bought work with or without a plan.

What each call costs

A list is charged per page: walking 300 events at 100 per page is three calls. POST /companies/find and POST /search/companies/filter cost their credit per 10 companies they return — ⌈returned/10⌉ a call, nothing when none is found. Your balance must hold the price of the results you ask for, ⌈limit/10⌉, before the call. POST /companies/verify costs 4 credits, 12 when its checks ask for the beneficial owners (ubo). POST /answers costs 8 credits, and every refusal is uncharged. One read of GET /events is free: with monitor_id, it lists what your own monitor matched, and that is part of monitoring. A POST /monitors over a search (prompt or filter instead of a company) is free to create; each match it delivers costs 1 credit, as a saved event search's hit does.

The free plan

A personal account without a paid plan gets 50 credits once, when the account is created (accounts that existed before 2026-10 received them when the free plan started). They expire 30 days after they are granted, and are spent before credits you bought. When a plan starts, its included credits arrive as usual; free credits you still have stay until they are spent or expire. Free credits do not pay for monitors created through the API or the MCP server; everything else they may pay for. Team workspaces do not get free credits. GET /account counts them in credits.remaining.

When you are charged

Credits are deducted before your request runs, and refunded if it fails. The rule:

• 2xx: charged its price. That includes an empty result. An empty list is an answer: "this company has no shareholders on file" is worth as much as a full page.
• 4xx and 5xx: not charged. A not-found company, a duplicate monitor, a validation error, a retired path's 410 or a server error costs you nothing.
• Redirects: a 301 (a merged company, a moved path) costs nothing. A 302 that hands you a paid document is the purchase, and is charged the document's price.
• 402: the call never ran; nothing was deducted.
• A replay of a request sent with an Idempotency-Key is not charged again.

Two headers say what a call cost:

Because the deduction happens first, a burst of concurrent requests can take your balance below what you expected before any of them return.

Running out

When your balance cannot cover a call, the API returns 402 and does not run it. Like every error, it is a problem document; required_credits and available_credits say by how much you are short:

{
  "type": "https://docs.registercheck.de/errors/insufficient_credits",
  "title": "Insufficient credits",
  "status": 402,
  "detail": "Insufficient credits. This request costs 25 credits.",
  "code": "insufficient_credits",
  "request_id": "9b0c2f5e-4d1a-4c3e-9a8e-6f0b1d2c3e4f",
  "required_credits": 25,
  "available_credits": 4
}

Buy more in the app under Settings › Plan & billing (Einstellungen › Plan & Abrechnung); paid by card, the new balance is live within a few seconds, by SEPA direct debit once the debit is confirmed.

With a paid plan, overage can be switched on on the Usage (API & Nutzung) page: calls the balance cannot cover then go on, and are invoiced after the month at 7.5 cents a credit on Starter, 2.25 cents on Business and 0.75 cents on Scale.

Seeing what you have used

Your balance and a breakdown by endpoint and by key are on the Usage (API & Nutzung) page.

Making calls cheaper

• Search first, then read. Three searches cost less than one company record.
• POST /search/companies/filter costs 1 credit per 10 returned results, up to 1,000 a page — 100 credits for 1,000 companies, far cheaper than 1,000 individual reads.
• Cache by company id. Ids are stable; the record behind them rarely changes.
• Use monitoring instead of re-reading companies to detect change. One monitor replaces an indefinite polling loop.