Credits
A credit is what you spend on the things that cost us money to run: anything that asks a model a question. Everything else is free, and most of what you do is everything else.
What costs what
| Feature | Credits | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Semantic search | 1 | One search written in words |
| Commute | 1 | One commute estimate from a property |
| Saved search | 1 | One standing alert, charged once when you save it |
| Price estimate | 2 | A valuation for one property |
| Matching | 2 | Your preferences run against the catalogue |
| Neighbourhood report | 3 | An area analysis with scores |
| Floor plan analysis | 3 | One floor plan read |
| Virtual staging | 5 | One room photograph staged |
| Investment analysis | 5 | Yield and return projections for one property |
These are the figures charged, not a copy of them kept somewhere else. The price list you see is read from the same place the charge is taken from, so it cannot drift out of step with your bill.
What is free
Everything you would resent paying for.
Filtering. Setting a price range, a district, a number of bedrooms, or drawing an area on a map costs nothing however many times you change your mind. It is a query over records we already hold, and charging for moving a slider would be indefensible.
Reading. Listings, photographs, price history, your saved properties, your notes, your history, your notifications and the alerts they carry.
Your preference profile. Reading what matching thinks about you is free. Running it against the catalogue is what costs.
Every alert an alert sends. You pay once, when you save the search.
Why a search is sometimes free and sometimes not
The difference is whether you typed a sentence.
Filters are a database query. A sentence has to be understood first: it is read for what it is asking, turned into something comparable against every property we hold, and matched by meaning. That is the part that costs, and it is also the part that finds the flat you could not have described in filters.
Signed out, semantic search is free. There is no account to charge.
Failures
If something fails after being charged, the credit comes back. A search that errors returns its credit before it returns the error; virtual staging is charged when the job is created and refunded by the worker if it cannot finish.
Charging for a failure is the one billing mistake everybody notices, and correctly so.
An empty result is not a failure. A search that ran and found nothing, or matching that ran against a thin profile, did the work and is charged for it. If matching keeps returning little, the fix is more history rather than more attempts.
Running out
Nothing is capped and nothing is throttled. When the balance will not cover a feature, that feature says so and does not run; everything free keeps working, which is most of the site.
Balance and history
Your balance and every transaction against it are on your billing page: what was spent, on what, and when. Refunds appear as their own entries rather than silently reversing a charge, so a total that looks wrong can be traced instead of guessed at.