An API credit is a provider-defined unit consumed by certain external requests and billed against the user’s plan with that provider — the currency third-party services meter their usage in.
| Term | API Credit |
|---|---|
| Category | APIs, Reliability and Publishing |
| Also known as | Provider Credit |
| Where it appears | Cost notices |
What it means in RankGear
When RankGear reaches an external service on your behalf — a data provider, an image generator, a scraping endpoint — some of those calls draw down credits from your account with that provider. RankGear surfaces this in its cost notices: the interface flags which actions spend provider credits before you commit to them, so a paid batch does not run silently. The credit itself is defined and priced by the provider, not by RankGear; RankGear only reports that a given request will consume one and, where it can, how many.
How to interpret it
Read a cost notice as a spend warning, not an error. It tells you an action will bill against your provider plan rather than run for free, so the decision to proceed is a budget decision. When a request fails, separate the two causes that a cost notice sits next to: a transient failure — a timeout or a momentary provider hiccup — is worth one bounded retry, whereas invalid configuration such as a missing key, a wrong endpoint, or an exhausted balance will fail again on every attempt and should stop rather than burn more credits. Use the visible status, the diagnostics, and a read-only credential test to tell those apart before you retry.
Example
You queue an image-generation pass for twelve factor articles. RankGear shows a cost notice estimating twelve provider credits and pauses for confirmation. One request times out mid-run; RankGear issues a single longer retry and it succeeds. A thirteenth call then returns an authorization error — the provider key has expired — so RankGear halts that call instead of retrying, sparing you repeated paid attempts against a credential that cannot succeed until it is fixed.
Important considerations
- Credits are the provider’s unit and the provider’s price: RankGear reports and estimates consumption but does not set or hold the balance — check the provider’s dashboard for the authoritative count.
- Distinguish transient from terminal: retry a timeout once within bounds, but stop on an authorization or configuration failure so you do not spend credits on a call that cannot succeed.
- Handle credentials and publishing targets carefully: connection and credential tests should stay read-only where possible, and keys and secrets must remain redacted in notices, logs, and reports.
- An estimate is not a guarantee: actual consumption can differ from the pre-run estimate depending on how the provider meters retries, partial results, and rate limits.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.