Credits & Billing
Ultralayer is pay-as-you-go: you hold a credit balance, and each billable request deducts its cost from it. No subscription, no seats, no minimum — you pay for what you call.
For current prices, see the pricing page. This page explains how the metering works.
The model
- One balance, every surface. API calls, MCP tool calls from your connected AI tools, alert executions, and signed-in app usage all draw on the same balance and appear in the same usage history.
- Costs are per request. Most requests follow a simple shape: a small base cost, plus a component that scales with how much you ask for (roughly per 10 records requested). Compute-heavy analysis — stakeholder identification, which runs a full retrieval-and-reasoning pipeline per call — costs more per request than lightweight retrieval.
- Search-scale requests are cheap by design. The pricing is built so that iterating freely — trying filters, refining queries, letting an agent explore — is not something you need to think twice about. A single balance top-up covers a very large number of retrieval calls.
Deduction and automatic refunds
Billing follows a strict deduct-then-refund contract:
- The cost is deducted before the work runs (this is also when a request with insufficient balance is rejected with
402— see errors). - If the request fails, the deduction is automatically refunded. You pay for results, not for attempts.
There is nothing to claim or dispute for a failed call — the refund is part of request handling.
Alerts
Alerts are billed as the underlying endpoint calls they make on their schedule — there is no alert surcharge. An alert polling list_wire every 15 minutes costs exactly what that list_wire call costs, 96 times a day. Keep polling costs in mind when choosing interval_minutes, but at search-scale prices, even aggressive monitoring is inexpensive.
Trial credits
New accounts receive a one-time grant of $0.50 in trial credits — enough for several hundred search-scale requests or a handful of full stakeholder analyses. It exists so you can evaluate the platform end to end, including from connected MCP clients, before purchasing anything.
Buying credits and tracking usage
Everything lives in the console:
- Buy credits — one-time purchases; credits don't expire.
- Balance — always visible in the header.
- Usage history — per-request logs with cost, endpoint, and origin (API key, MCP, app, or alert), with filters and charts over time windows.
Running out
A request that would exceed your balance is rejected with 402 Payment Required before any work runs — nothing silently degrades, and you can never spend below zero. Top up in the console and retry; no other state needs fixing.