Plans & credits
Product Research is bundled with Hilal Software — there’s no separate Product Research subscription. Your Hilal Software plan tier sets your monthly credit allowance; usage is metered per action.
How it’s bundled
| Hilal Software plan | Product Research access | Monthly credits |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Limited preview | 3 lifetime credits to try it |
| Basic | Full | Bundled allowance |
| Premium | Full + higher allowance | Larger bundled allowance |
| Enterprise | Full + highest allowance | Unlimited or large bundle |
Exact credit numbers per tier are on the pricing page and in the app at Settings → Subscriptions & add-ons.
What each action costs
| Action | Credits |
|---|---|
| Standard search | 1 |
| Search expand (50+ results) | 2 |
| Product detail (first view of an ASIN this billing period) | 1 |
| Product detail (repeat views, same ASIN) | 0 |
| Chat — conversational reply (no search triggered) | 0 |
| Chat — triggered search | 1 (just for the search; the chat itself is still free) |
| Export to PDF or CSV | 1 |
| History re-fetch (open a past search) | 0 |
| History re-run (re-execute with fresh data) | 1 |
| Watchlist add / remove / view | 0 |
| Watchlist refresh (cache > 30 min) | 0 (today; may move to 0.1 credit in Run 3 if scaling demands it) |
How credits work under the hood
When you run a billable action, Hilal:
- Reserves the credit cost in Redis (5-minute TTL).
- Runs the action.
- Commits the charge atomically to your account on success.
- Releases the reservation on failure (no charge).
In practice you see a balance number that ticks down per action. If a search fails partway through, you don’t pay; if it succeeds, the credit is permanently spent.
Topping up
Two ways to add credits if you exhaust your monthly bundle:
- Upgrade your Hilal Software plan — instant; the new tier’s allowance kicks in immediately, pro-rated for the rest of the cycle.
- Buy a credit add-on pack — pre-paid credit packs in the Subscriptions & add-ons page. Don’t expire as long as your plan stays active.
Refunds
Hilal automatically refunds credits when:
- A search fails server-side (5xx, internal error).
- An export job ends in
failedstate. - A product detail call hits a hard data-source outage and returns nothing useful.
You don’t have to ask. Refunds appear in your credit ledger.
Soft and hard limits
When you’re below 10% of your monthly allowance, Hilal shows a yellow banner (soft limit). When you hit zero, billable actions return 402 Insufficient Credits; non-billable actions (history re-fetch, watchlist view) keep working — you don’t lose access to your data.
FAQs
What’s the difference between credits and the API rate limits? Credits track spend; rate limits track velocity. You can have plenty of credits and still hit a rate limit if you’re running a lot of searches per minute. Both reset.
Do credits roll over? Yes — unused monthly credits roll forward up to 2× your monthly allowance. Add-on credits don’t expire.
Can I see a usage history? Yes — Settings → Subscriptions & add-ons → Credit ledger shows every charge and refund.
Are AI Chat tokens metered separately? No — chat is free, and triggered searches deduct a search credit, not a chat credit.