Pricing and metering

Zuse is metered per request. There are no seats and no platform fee. Prices and limits are the same for every account and do not move with your usage.

Credit

A developer account gets $10.00 of credit once, when it is made. No card is needed. Everything you run draws from it, at the prices below: the REST API, the MCP server, the console playground, and the recruiting workspace.

• That credit never expires.
• Buy more from Billing at any time: $10, $25, $50 or any amount from $10 to $1,000, paid by card through Stripe. Credit you buy never expires. You can also turn on automatic top-ups, which buy the same amount again whenever the balance falls under $2, $5 or $10.
• A practice account (Zuse Hire) is on the practice plan instead: $25 a month, first month free, with $10.00 of plan credit each month. Plan credit is spent first and does not carry over; credit the practice buys is spent after it. Without a live plan, a practice's requests are refused with 402 and the error plan_required.
• When five new practices make an account with your referral link (Referrals in Zuse Developers, or Account in Zuse Hire), $10.00 is added once, and never expires either. The link keeps working after that, but earns nothing more.
• When the credit cannot cover a request, the request is refused with 402 (credit_exhausted) and nothing runs. Service resumes once credit is added.
• Reading your usage, reference data, managing keys, and MCP initialize, ping and tools/list are always free.

For more credit, volume pricing, or higher rate limits, contact us.

Credit belongs to the team

A request is paid for by the team it is made in: in the console, the team you are switched to; over the API and MCP, the team the key was created in.

A team's credit is its owner's credit, and every team one person owns draws on that same balance. So inviting people to a team does not add credit, and neither does creating another team. Everyone on the team sees one balance.

Prices

Each price is what the request costs us (our own index, or the research and data providers it calls) plus what Zuse adds: matching the right person, checking it, and keeping the answer so your team never pays for the same thing twice.

One clinic with its people (GET /v2/clinics/{ref}) is priced as one License check.

What a Nearby (or Nearby clinics) request costs follows what it returns.

What $10 covers

The developer signup credit, or a month of the practice plan's credit, is enough to try everything on a real opening. For example: 11 Nearby searches ($2.20), 4 License checks ($2.00), 8 Backgrounds ($2.00), 4 Intro notes ($1.00), 2 Web searches ($1.00) and 3 Contacts ($1.80), $10.00 in all.

These are early-access prices and may change. A change applies to everyone, and is announced in the changelog before it takes effect.

Misses are free

A request that finds nothing is not charged:

• A license search with meta.outcome of no_match or jurisdiction_not_indexed
• A professionals or practices request that returns no records
• An enrichment or a brief with matched: false
• A web search that finds nobody
• A clinics request that returns no clinics, or clinic research with found: false
• A contact that finds no email or phone (matched: false)
• Background, Intro notes or Contact for a person your team already has them for: the answer is read from your team's records (from_records: true), from any channel, unless you send refresh
• Clinic research for a clinic your team researched in the last 30 days (from_records: true), unless you send refresh
• Any request that fails with a 4xx or 5xx status
• A request replayed from an Idempotency-Key

What counts as one request

• License check: one request, one charge, whatever the limit.
• Nearby: one request is charged once, by the number of records it returns. Ask for a smaller limit when you only need the nearest few. To list everyone in a radius, follow pagination.next_cursor; pagination.total on the first response tells you how many records there are, and so what the whole list will cost.
• Background, Intro notes and Contact: one request is one person. They are separate operations, so all three for the same person are three requests. Each is charged the first time your team runs it for a person; after that it is read from your team's records at no charge.
• Web search: one request is charged once, however many people it finds. With include_contacts, each person it adds from People Data Labs is also charged as one Contact, and their details are then kept for your team, so a later Contact for that person is free.

MCP tool calls are metered exactly like their REST equivalents.

A request runs when the team's remaining credit covers its base price, and it always finishes. A Nearby request that returns more than 10 records can therefore end with the balance a few cents past the limit. credit_remaining_usd then reads 0, and the next request is refused.

Seeing what you spent

Every metered response ends with a billing block:

"billing": { "operation": "source", "cost_usd": 0.1, "credit_remaining_usd": 9.9 }

GET /v2/usage returns the team's balance and the current prices at any time. The console shows requests and spend per day, per operation, per channel and per person, and the balance is always visible in its top bar.

Limits

Separately from the credit, there are limits on how fast and how much an account can read. They are in Rate limits and retries.