# Billing

How ByteKit prices bandwidth and credits, and how balances, top-ups, and spending controls behave.

ByteKit meters two separate things: **bandwidth**, which pays for the capture endpoints, and
**credits**, which pay for search and schema extraction. The relevant balance is checked before
any billable work is admitted, so a request either runs against a balance or is rejected — it
never continues as unpriced usage.

## Terms

The billing pages and guides use these words in the sense given here.

- **Bandwidth** — the meter, counted in bytes, for scrape, fetch, screenshot, sitemap and monitor-run requests, and schema extraction also consumes it for its source-page fetch. See [Bandwidth billing](https://bytekit.com/docs/billing/bandwidth).
- **Credits** — the meter for search and schema extraction. See [Credit billing](https://bytekit.com/docs/billing/credits).
- **Included allowance** — the bandwidth and credits your plan includes for each billing period. Unused bandwidth can roll over to the next period under the rules in [Top-ups and rollover](https://bytekit.com/docs/billing/top-ups#billing-period-rollover); credits do not roll over and reset every billing period.
- **USD balance** — the dollars you add with top-ups, including automatic top-ups. It never expires and is not tied to the plan you held when you added it. See [Top-ups and rollover](https://bytekit.com/docs/billing/top-ups#the-usd-balance).
- **Starter grant** — the one-time 100 MB of bandwidth and 100 credits a new pay-as-you-go account receives. It is not a purchase and does not expire. See [the starter grant](https://bytekit.com/docs/billing/balance#starter-grant).
- **Balance** — the umbrella term for what a request draws from: your included allowance, then your USD balance, then your starter grant. A request is checked against the bandwidth balance, the credit balance or both before it is admitted. See [what happens when a balance runs out](https://bytekit.com/docs/billing/balance).

## Prices and plan limits

This section explains how usage is metered, not what it costs. For each plan's monthly price,
included bandwidth and credits, top-up rates, concurrent captures and requests per second, see
[bytekit.com/pricing](https://bytekit.com/pricing). `GET /v1/plans` returns the same public plan
catalog programmatically, with no authentication.

- [When your balance runs out](https://bytekit.com/docs/billing/balance) — What happens when a ByteKit bandwidth or credit balance reaches zero.
- [Bandwidth billing](https://bytekit.com/docs/billing/bandwidth) — How ByteKit measures billed bandwidth for capture and sitemap endpoints.
- [Credit billing](https://bytekit.com/docs/billing/credits) — How search and schema extraction consume credits.
- [Top-ups and rollover](https://bytekit.com/docs/billing/top-ups) — How your USD balance is spent, why it never expires, and how plan allowance rolls over.
- [Spending controls](https://bytekit.com/docs/billing/spending) — How spending caps and automatic bandwidth top-ups behave.