Credits & Pricing

How cloud credits work, what each feature costs, and how to control spend

Cloud features are priced in credits - small integers, not dollars. Local audits never cost credits.

Getting credits

Source	Credits	Notes
Free plan	500/month	Every account, no card required; resets each calendar month
Pro plan ($19/mo)	3,000/month	Resets each billing period; unused monthly credits expire
Credit top-up (min $10)	100 per $1	Paid plan only; pick any amount; never expire

Monthly credits are spent before purchased top-up credits. Subscribe and top up from the Billing & Credits page in the dashboard.

Checking your balance

bash

squirrel credits

Plan:    Pro
Balance: 2340 credits (2000 monthly + 340 purchased)
         monthly credits reset 2026-07-08

Pricing:
  ai_parse               1 per page
  site_metadata          12 per run
  ...

Top up: https://squirrelscan.com/account/credits

squirrel auth status also shows your balance, and the start banner of every audit shows the estimated spend against it.

Pricing

Feature	Cost	Used by
Report publishing (public only)	2 per report	publishing a `public` report (unlisted/private are free)
AI page analysis	1 per page	`ai/llm-parsability`, `ai/page-type-match`
Authority signals	1 per page	`eeat/authority-signals`
Blocking check (ad + privacy)	5 per audit	All three Blocking rules share one check
Technology detection	5 per audit	Technology detection
Site metadata	12 per audit	Site metadata (cached 30 days per domain)
Editor’s summary	8 per audit	Editor’s summary (Pro only)
Dead link checking	1 per 100 URLs	`links/dead-links`
Dead-link render escalation	2 per link	WAF-blocked links retried via a rendered fetch
Browser rendering	2 per page	Cloud rendering
Keyword gaps	25 per audit	`gaps/keywords` (opt-in)
Content gaps	25 per audit	`gaps/content` (opt-in)
Issue enrichment	3 per issue	AI recommendations in the dashboard

A typical 50-page audit with the default cloud rules costs around 60-110 credits depending on how many pages the per-page rules analyze.

Spend controls

Three guardrails keep an audit from spending more than you expect:

squirrel.toml

toml

[cloud]
max_credits_per_audit = 1000  # hard cap per audit; 0 = unlimited
confirm_threshold = 50        # estimates above this prompt before spending
enabled = true                # master switch for all cloud features

Per-audit cap - if the estimate exceeds max_credits_per_audit, work is truncated deterministically at the cap and remaining rules report skipped with reason credit-cap-reached.
Confirmation prompt - in a terminal, an estimate above confirm_threshold asks before proceeding. Use --yes to skip prompts (e.g. in CI or agent workflows). Non-interactive runs proceed without prompting, bounded by the cap.
Master switch - enabled = false turns off all cloud calls for the project.

See the cloud configuration reference for all options.

When credits run out

Nothing breaks. Cloud rules report skipped with reason insufficient-credits, the audit completes with all local rules, and you see a single warning with a top-up link. If a cloud service fails entirely after you were charged, the charge is automatically refunded.

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