Insufficient credits
When you hit zero credits, billable actions return an Insufficient Credits error. Non-billable actions (history re-fetch, watchlist view, chat without a triggered search) keep working.
This page is the fast path back to a usable balance.
What you’ll see
- A red banner on the Product Research home: “Out of credits.”
- Search button greyed out in the guided form.
- A toast when you try to run a billable action: “You don’t have enough credits to run this search.”
- Chat-triggered searches are blocked (the AI explains and offers alternatives).
Three fast paths to top up
Path 1: Buy a credit add-on pack
The fastest path. Settings → Subscriptions & add-ons → Add-ons → Product Research credit pack → pick a size.
| Pack size | Use case |
|---|---|
| 5 credits | Quick top-up for a couple more searches. |
| 20 credits | Power-user week. |
| 50 credits | Heavy research cycle. |
| 200 credits | Large-scale niche-mining project. |
Add-on credits never expire (as long as your subscription stays active) and stack with your monthly bundle.
Path 2: Upgrade your Hilal Software plan
If you’re consistently hitting the cap, the monthly bundle on a higher tier may be cheaper than recurring add-on packs.
Settings → Subscriptions & add-ons → Change plan. Upgrades are pro-rated for the rest of the cycle and effective immediately.
Path 3: Wait for the next cycle
If you’re patient: monthly credits refill at the start of your next billing cycle. The Subscriptions & add-ons page shows the exact reset date.
Read the credit ledger before topping up
Before buying a pack, check Settings → Subscriptions & add-ons → Credit ledger. You’re looking for:
- Excess spending on one search type. If most charges are exports, can you batch your exports differently?
- Failed searches that should have been refunded. Refunds usually post within 30 seconds; if a failed search isn’t refunded, file a support ticket.
- Repeat product-detail charges. First view costs a credit; repeats are free for the rest of the billing cycle. If you’re seeing repeat charges, it may be a cycle boundary — wait until you’re earlier in the cycle.
Refunds: when they happen automatically
Hilal automatically refunds credits in three cases:
- A search fails server-side (5xx, internal error).
- An export fails during generation.
- A product detail call doesn’t return useful data due to a hard upstream outage.
The refund posts within 30 seconds and shows in the credit ledger. If a refund is missing 5+ minutes after a failure, the failure may not have been one of the auto-refundable cases. File a ticket with the search/export UUID.
Estimating monthly need
A rough heuristic for new sellers planning credit budget:
| Activity level | Approx credits/month |
|---|---|
| Light (1–2 searches per week, occasional product detail) | 10–20 |
| Moderate (a few searches a week, regular product detail viewing) | 30–60 |
| Heavy (daily searches, frequent expand, exports) | 100–200 |
| Power (deep research workflow, multiple expand-and-export cycles) | 200+ |
Premium tier monthly bundles cover Moderate-to-Heavy out of the box. If you’re consistently in the Power band, an Enterprise plan is more economical than ongoing add-ons.
When credits are exhausted
The “graceful degradation” path:
- Read access stays working: history, watchlist, completed exports, completed chats.
- Chat keeps working for conversational replies (no credit cost).
- New searches, expand, fresh product details, and new exports are blocked until you top up.
You don’t lose data. You just temporarily can’t generate new data.