Browse AI Credits Calculator: How Many Credits Does Your Workflow Actually Need?

Browse AI doesn't charge per website or per robot. It charges per credit, and credits are consumed in a way that isn't obvious until you've already spent them.

The result is a common pattern: someone signs up for the free plan, builds something reasonable, turns on a schedule, and discovers days later that 50 credits are gone. Or the opposite — someone upgrades to a paid plan for a workflow that would have fit inside the free tier with room to spare.

Both are avoidable with about two minutes of arithmetic. That's what the calculator below does.

Estimate your workflow

Enter the shape of the job you actually want to run. If you're not sure about a number, use your best guess — the goal is an order-of-magnitude answer, not a precise invoice.

A note on what this is and isn't: this is an estimate, not a billing simulator. It applies Browse AI's published credit rules to the workflow you describe. Real consumption can differ if a page returns more rows than expected, if a site is classified as premium, or if a run partially fails and is retried. Treat the output as a planning number, and check your actual usage in your Browse AI dashboard after the first week.

How Browse AI credits work

Three rules govern everything.

One credit covers 10 rows extracted from a page, or one screenshot. That's the base unit. A page returning 30 rows costs 3 credits. A page returning 4 rows still costs 1 credit, because credits don't subdivide — anything up to 10 rows is a single credit.

Some sites cost more. A subset of sites are classified as premium, typically because they need heavier infrastructure to load or have stronger bot prevention. Runs against those sites carry a minimum cost of somewhere between 2 and 10 credits, regardless of how little data comes back. You generally find out a site is premium when you try it, which is one reason to run manually before scheduling.

Credits reset each billing cycle and don't roll over. An unused allowance is gone at the end of the month. There's no banking it for a heavy month later.

That's the whole system. The complexity comes from how those rules interact with the structure of your workflow.

Why detail pages change the math

This is the single biggest source of surprise bills, so it's worth walking through slowly.

Imagine a category page listing 50 products, with name and price visible for each. Extracting that page returns 50 rows, which costs 5 credits. Cheap.

Now suppose the listing doesn't show what you actually need — you want full specifications, or stock status, or a description that only appears on each product's own page. To get that, the robot has to visit 50 separate pages. Each page visit returns its own small set of rows, and each one costs at least 1 credit. That's 50 additional credits.

Your workflow just went from 5 credits to 55. It's eleven times more expensive, and from the outside it looks like the same job.

The general rule: cost scales with pages visited, not with data volume. Fifty rows on one page is 5 credits. The same fifty items spread across fifty pages is 50 credits. If you can get what you need from the list page alone, do that — it's the difference between a workflow that fits in the free tier and one that doesn't.

Before adding detail-page extraction, ask a blunt question: will you actually use those extra fields? Not "might they be nice to have" — will you open the spreadsheet and look at that column? If the answer is no, leave it out. This one decision has more impact on your monthly cost than every other setting combined.

Why monitoring frequency matters just as much

The second multiplier is schedule.

Take the 55-credit workflow above. Run it once, manually, and it costs 55 credits — already past the free allowance, but a one-time cost.

Now put it on a monitoring schedule, checking every three days. That's roughly ten runs a month. Fifty-five credits becomes approximately 500–550 credits per month.

Nothing about that schedule feels aggressive. Checking competitor prices twice a week is a perfectly normal business requirement. But the arithmetic is unforgiving: every run multiplies your per-run cost by the number of times you run it. A workflow that's expensive per run becomes very expensive on a schedule.

The practical implication is that frequency should be chosen deliberately rather than defaulted to. Ask what decision you'd actually make differently with fresher data. If you review competitor pricing in a Monday meeting, weekly is enough — daily costs seven times more and changes nothing about your behavior. Hourly monitoring makes sense for genuinely volatile data like stock availability during a launch; it rarely makes sense for anything else.

If you want a fuller walkthrough of how these workflows get built in the first place, our guide to automating website data into Google Sheets covers the setup end to end.

Deciding: is the free plan enough?

The free tier gives you 50 credits per month, 2 websites (meaning 2 domains, not 2 individual URLs), unlimited robots, access to monitors, workflows, and integrations, and a minimum monitoring interval of one hour.

Fifty credits sounds small, and for some workflows it is. But it covers more than people assume:

• A weekly list-page extraction of 50 products costs 5 credits per run, or 20 credits a month. That fits comfortably.
• A daily check on a small list — say 20 items, 2 credits per run — costs about 60 credits a month. Just over the line.
• A one-time research pull of several hundred rows across a handful of pages often lands well under 50 credits total.

If your calculator result came back under about 40 credits a month, the free plan is genuinely sufficient and you should stay on it. There's no strategic reason to upgrade early, and no benefit to paying for capacity you don't consume — credits don't accumulate.

The two constraints most likely to push you off the free tier aren't credits at all. They're the 2-domain limit (if you need to track three different competitor sites, you're out regardless of volume) and the hourly minimum interval (if you need faster checks, you need a paid plan).

Deciding: does the Personal plan make sense?

If your estimate exceeds the free allowance, the entry paid tier is Personal, which comes in three billing options that differ in a way worth understanding.

Annual 12k: $228 per year, presented as a $19 per month equivalent. Includes 12,000 credits, granted upfront for the full 12-month term.

Annual 24k: $456 per year, presented as a $38 per month equivalent. Includes 24,000 credits, granted upfront for the full 12-month term.

Monthly 2k: $48 per month. Includes 2,000 credits per month.

All three include 5 websites, unlimited robots, and up to 3 users.

Note what that actually means. Twelve months of monthly billing costs $576 and provides 24,000 credits — the same annual capacity as the Annual 24k plan, which costs $456. The difference isn't only price, it's how the credits arrive. Annual plans grant the whole allowance upfront and impose no monthly cap, so a heavy month followed by a light one is fine. Monthly billing resets at 2,000 credits every cycle, and unused credits don't roll over, so a month that needs 3,000 credits can't borrow from the month that only needed 1,000.

That distinction matters because a monthly average is not the same as a monthly ceiling. If your work is seasonal or bursty, compare your heaviest expected month against the 2,000-credit monthly cap, not just your yearly total against the annual grant.

With that caveat, the decision comes down to your annual volume:

• Under ~1,000 credits per month on average (up to 12,000/year): Annual 12k. Lowest cost, and the upfront grant absorbs uneven usage.
• Between ~1,000 and ~2,000 credits per month (12,000–24,000/year): Annual 24k. This is the range where it's easy to assume monthly billing is the only option — it isn't. Annual 24k covers the same yearly volume for $456 rather than $576, and without a monthly cap.
• Consistently over 2,000 credits per month (more than 24,000/year): you're past what Personal covers in any of its three forms. Look at higher tiers, or reconsider the workflow's design — at this volume, cutting detail-page extraction or halving your frequency usually saves more than any plan change.

Monthly billing earns its place for a different reason than capacity: it's the only option you can cancel next month. If you're still unsure the workflow is worth keeping, paying $48 for a cycle or two is a reasonable way to find out before committing to a year.

One thing to be clear about: $19 and $38 are not month-to-month prices. They're the annualized presentations of $228 and $456 commitments. If you want the ability to cancel next month, the relevant number is $48.

Pricing as of August 2026 — check the Browse AI pricing page for current rates.

Worked examples

A weekly competitor price check. One category page, 40 products, once a week. Four credits per run, 16 credits a month. Free plan, comfortably. This is the most common real-world case and it costs nothing.

A daily job board scrape. Two listing pages, about 60 roles total, every weekday. Six credits per run, roughly 120 credits a month. Over the free limit, well under Personal annual 12k. At 1,440 credits a year, the $228 annual plan covers it with most of the allowance unused.

A product catalog with detail pages, monitored. One list page of 50 products plus all 50 detail pages, checked every three days. Around 55 credits per run, roughly 550 a month, or 6,600 a year. Personal annual 12k covers it, but note that dropping the detail pages would take this to 50 credits a month — inside the free tier. The detail pages are costing about $200 a year. Worth asking whether they earn it.

Screenshot monitoring. Three page screenshots, twice daily. Six credits per run, about 180 a month. Over free, comfortably within Personal annual 12k.

A premium site, modest volume. One list page returning 15 rows, but the site is premium with a 10-credit minimum. The data is worth 2 credits; the run costs 10. Daily, that's 300 credits a month. Premium classification, not data volume, is the cost driver here — and it's worth checking whether the same information is available on a non-premium source.

When Browse AI gets expensive

Three patterns account for nearly all high bills:

Detail-page extraction at scale. Cost scales with page count. Hundreds of detail pages per run will consume thousands of credits monthly no matter how you configure the rest.

High-frequency monitoring of expensive runs. The multiplier compounds. If your per-run cost is above ~20 credits, anything more frequent than daily deserves scrutiny.

Premium sites you didn't know were premium. A 10-credit minimum on a run that should cost 1 credit is a 10x markup, and it's invisible until you look at consumption.

If your estimate came back uncomfortably high, work through those three in order before changing plans. In most cases, redesigning the workflow saves more than upgrading.

When another tool may be better

Browse AI isn't the right instrument for every job, and the calculator can point you away from it as easily as toward it.

If you only want to know when a page changes, and you don't need the changed data as spreadsheet rows, dedicated monitoring tools are simpler and usually cheaper. Visualping, Distill.io, and changedetection.io are built specifically for change alerts, with free tiers oriented around monitoring frequency rather than extraction volume. Paying credits for structured rows you never open is waste.

If you can write code, a scripting approach gives you per-request cost control and better handling of edge cases. The tradeoff is maintenance, which is real, but at high volume the economics favor it.

If your estimate exceeds a few thousand credits a month, purpose-built extraction infrastructure will likely cost less than credit-based pricing at that scale.

If your collection is genuinely one-off, doing it by hand once may be faster than building and validating a robot.

Before you commit

If the calculator says the free plan covers you, the right move is to stay on it. Build the workflow, run it manually a few times, confirm the output is useful, and only then turn on a schedule. Your first week of real usage data will tell you more than any estimate.

If it says you'll need a paid plan, spend an hour trying to make the workflow cheaper first. Drop fields you won't use. Cut detail pages. Halve the frequency. Then re-run the numbers. A surprising share of workflows that look like paid-tier jobs turn out to fit in the free tier after that exercise.

Either way, test one workflow before deciding anything. Browse AI

FAQ

How many credits does one page cost?

One credit covers up to 10 rows extracted from a page, or one screenshot. A page returning 30 rows costs 3 credits; a page returning 4 rows still costs 1, since credits don't subdivide.

Why do detail pages cost so much more?

Cost scales with pages visited, not data volume. Extracting 50 products from a single list page costs 5 credits. Visiting each product's own page costs at least 1 credit per page — 50 credits for the same 50 items.

Do unused credits roll over?

No. Credits reset at the end of each billing cycle. The annual Personal plans are different in that they grant the whole allowance — 12,000 or 24,000 credits — upfront for the year, so usage can be uneven across months.

How do I know if a site is premium?

Browse AI classifies certain sites as premium, with a minimum cost of 2–10 credits per run. The practical way to find out is to run the robot manually once and check consumption before scheduling anything.

Is the free plan enough for competitor price tracking?

Often yes. A weekly extraction from one category page of 50 products costs about 20 credits a month, well within the 50-credit allowance. It stops fitting when you add detail-page extraction, track more than 2 domains, or check more than about once a day.

Should I choose annual or monthly billing?

Personal has three billing options, so it isn't a straight two-way choice. Annual 12k ($228/year, 12,000 credits upfront) is best under about 1,000 credits a month. Annual 24k ($456/year, 24,000 credits upfront) covers roughly 1,000–2,000 credits a month, and costs less than twelve months of monthly billing ($576) for the same annual capacity. Monthly ($48/month, 2,000 credits per month) is worth choosing for the ability to cancel rather than for capacity, and it caps every individual month at 2,000 credits, whereas the annual plans grant the credits upfront with no monthly cap. Estimate your yearly volume, then check your heaviest single month against the monthly cap before choosing.

Ready to test one workflow? Browse AI