Pricing

buzzabout presents product usage in credits. Data work is priced by results collected or processed; AI inference is priced separately from tokens consumed. Subscription and top-up payments are cash in US dollars. Credits project one canonical USD wallet, not a second balance.

What an action costs

Ordinary registered plans use the same credit action weights. Read your account's stored prices from GET /v1/prices rather than reconstructing a quote from a plan name or assuming a missing category is free.

Other configured actions remain distinct: legacy tracking dispatch costs 15 credits, report generation 300, and legacy audience-insights generation 600. These are not additional run fees on every modern listening-agent or audience-profile collection. Balance sync has no charge.

New monthly V3 plans include the following allowances. Seats include the account owner.

Onboarding starts with a $1 one-day trial with 1,000 credits. The first paid month is $49 / $89 / $225, then the monthly prices above. Existing unchanged V3 subscriptions receive the new monthly allowance at their next allocation boundary. Existing annual subscribers retain their offering's discounted cash price and monthly purchasing power; new V3 annual plans are not offered. See the plan comparison.

AI inference is charged separately

POST /v1/ask and MCP buzzabout__ask are charged for inference consumed by the turn. The token-based charge settles after the reply; it is not a fixed 15-credit assistant fee. Data collection or processing requested by the assistant is charged separately at its applicable action prices.

MCP buzzabout__query invokes an AI planner and also incurs variable inference charges, even when querying already-collected data. Provider costs and serving-model terms determine the canonical USD charge; customer credits project it at the account rate. Auto served by Luna uses provider cost × 1.50; explicit Luna and other serving cases use × 1.10. There is no flat planner fee.

Reading existing rows, saved results, messages, run status, account info or prices does not start another paid run. Custom-parameter test previews are free. The app's keyword estimates and Preview mentions inspection are distinct from a billed public research preview; asking the assistant to produce or interpret them can still consume charged inference.

Reservation-based charging

The four public data categories reserve enough canonical USD for the upper-bound result count before work starts and refund unused reservation value on completion. In credit terms, a request for 500 one-credit mentions returning 412 reserves 500 credits, settles at 412, and releases 88. The server converts those amounts using the account's captured terms. Failed work releases its unused reservation; already-settled work follows that operation's actual-result rules.

A public research preview reserves one credit per source. URL previews refund sources returning no data. MCP collect_mentions uses this billed preview internally: a thin preview can prevent collection spending without making the preview free. Token-settled AI inference is separate from result-count reservations.

Programmatic access

curl https://api.buzzabout-staging.com/v1/prices \
  -H "X-API-Key: $BUZZABOUT_API_KEY"

{
  "status": "success",
  "data": {
    "prices_credits": {
      "mention": "1.000000",
      "audience_profile": "3.000000",
      "post_processing": "0.500000",
      "preview_generation": "1.000000"
    },
    "billing": {
      "unit": "credits",
      "catalog_version": "2026-09-18",
      "precision": 6
    }
  }
}

This excerpt shows the credit fields; the response also retains its USD compatibility fields. prices_credits contains six-decimal strings, or null for an unavailable category. billing can be null when contract credit terms are unavailable; USD prices remain readable. currency, rate and prices retain USD compatibility semantics. The legacy rate can also be null on a category-priced contract. Keep full decimal precision in arithmetic and round only for display, never to determine affordability.

Top-ups and history

The app lets you choose credits and shows the cash charge secondarily. Top-ups are paid in exact USD cents at the server-confirmed account rate, with a $5 minimum. Captured payment terms determine the credit receipt; a later plan change does not rewrite it. Cash payments, invoices, affiliate payouts and the USD ledger remain dollar-native.

GET /v1/me/usage_history is an account-wide, paginated spend-only feed. quantity remains non-negative USD charged. quantity_credits, credit_rate_usd, billing_catalog_version and credit_value_basis identify its credit equivalent:

• snapshot: complete captured event terms are preserved, even without a current account rate.
• current: a pre-snapshot event is projected at today's rate, not reconstructed as an event-time credit charge.
• null metadata: an uncaptured event has no available current rate.

Current wallet totals use the active account rate. Do not sum differently rated historical credit snapshots to compute today's balance. Categories may include ai_assistant, report, audience_research, tracking, research_mention, tracking_mention and preview_generation; treat unknown strings defensively. An ai_assistant history row is not evidence that current Ask is free.

Next steps

• GET /v1/prices — live prices in both units.
• GET /v1/me — current usage and credit history.
• MCP tools — inference versus free raw reads.