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Rate limits cap how fast you can call the API. Credits cap how much: authenticated usage is metered in credits, and every organization gets an allowance of them at no cost.

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Monthly allowance

100,000 requests a month, free. The allowance resets each month, so it is a recurring budget rather than a one-off trial. To keep going once it is spent, buy a credit package in the console — that is also where your current allowance and remaining balance are shown. Quoting it in requests works because a credit is a request for the two operations that matter here: search and fetch each cost one. Anything priced differently draws more than one credit per call, which is why the rule below still holds — read what a call cost from the response rather than counting calls. Unauthenticated requests are not metered at all. They are capped by the request limits instead, so evaluating without a key does not draw on the allowance. Pay-per-request calls do not touch it either: each one is paid for in USDC as it is made.

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What a call costs

Each billed operation has its own credit price, keyed by SKU: Two things to keep in mind when you budget against these:
  • Prices are per-organization. Read what a call actually cost from the response rather than assuming a flat rate.
  • Search mode picks the SKU. Over HTTP, pass mode on /v1/search; over MCP an integrator can pin it with _meta["keenable/overrides"]. When neither is set the search runs in pro mode, unless your organization has a different default. The response echoes the mode that served the call.

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Reading usage per call

Over MCP, every authenticated tool call reports its cost under _meta["keenable/usage"], alongside the result rather than inside the model-visible content:
credits is what the call cost, and paid tells you which bucket it came from — false for the free monthly allowance, true for purchased credits. This is what to attribute cost against per call; see Metadata for integrators for the full field list. Unauthenticated calls are unbilled and omit the block entirely.

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When credits run out

With the allowance spent and no purchased credits remaining, /v1/search and /v1/fetch return 402. Buy a package in the console to resume, or wait for the allowance to reset. To keep it from getting that far, turn on auto top-up: it buys more credits whenever your purchased balance runs low.