Credits and Billing

Kafkai usage is prepaid. You buy credits, tool calls consume them, and every response tells you what it cost. There are no subscriptions and no per-seat fees.

Buying credits

Credit packs are sold in Japanese yen. Prices are listed on the pricing page, and once you are signed in you buy from the top-up page — the same packs, one click from the dashboard. Metered calls need a positive balance, so check yours before your agent starts work and buy a pack if it is empty. We sometimes grant free credits to new accounts; when we do, we tell you how many and how long they last.

Credits are valid for 90 days, counting the day they are added as day 1, and the oldest credits are spent first. The top-up page and the dashboard show how many credits are still unused from your oldest purchase and the last day they can be spent, and we email you 14 days and 7 days before any credits expire. Whatever is unused after the last valid day is removed, and we email you what was removed and what is left.

Prices on both pages are quoted with Japanese consumption tax included, and the smaller line under each pack shows the tax on its own. Checkout works the tax out from the billing address you enter, so the total shown there before you pay is the amount charged. A buyer outside Japan may be charged a different amount.

Every purchase issues a qualified invoice (適格請求書) carrying our registration number, so a Japanese business can claim the input tax credit. The payment confirmation links to it.

Credit validity and refund conditions are defined in the Terms of Service — the ToS is the authoritative document for those rules.

What a tool call costs

There are two kinds of metered tools.

Read tools — everything that returns data you already have — charge in two parts:

a flat call fee — the same for every read tool, and
a per-row amount for the data rows actually returned.

Kafkai checks that your balance covers the call fee before the tool runs, then deducts both together once the tool has returned data.

Three analysis tools — competitor analysis, ranking changes and SERP data — carry a higher call fee than a plain list. One more, kafkai_find_competitors, carries its own call fee, because it buys fresh competitor, authority and judgement data rather than reading what a project already has; its per-row amount is the same as every other read. Nothing else varies. So a call that returns 20 keywords costs more than one that returns 5, and asking for a smaller limit is the direct way to spend less.

The call fee is charged per call, not per row, so it is worth knowing which way to page a long list. Reading 100 keywords in one call pays the call fee once; reading the same 100 20 at a time pays it five times, for the same rows. When a long list is genuinely needed, ask for the largest page the tool allows rather than many small ones.

Research tools — the ones that make Kafkai go and fetch fresh data — are priced per site researched, because that is how the work scales: every site in a run gets its own keyword and backlink research.

kafkai_create_project charges a base fee for your site, plus a competitor fee for each competitor you give.
kafkai_add_competitor charges the competitor fee once.
kafkai_update_keywords charges the base fee for your site plus the competitor fee for every competitor in the project — the same shape as creation, because every site is researched again.
kafkai_update_backlinks charges a smaller backlinks-only fee for each site it actually fetches; sites fetched within the last day are skipped and not charged.

Two publishing tools carry a flat one-credit fee: kafkai_list_publishing_destinations and kafkai_add_publishing_destination.

Each of these tools states its price in its own description, the response's billing object shows what a call cost, and every rate — research actions, the backlinks-only refresh, and the read rate — is published on the pricing page.

Five tools are always free:

kafkai_get_credit_balance — checking your balance,
kafkai_delete_project — deleting a project,
kafkai_delete_competitor — removing a competitor from a project,
kafkai_delete_publishing_destination — deleting a publishing destination,
kafkai_publish_article — publishing text your agent wrote to one of your destinations.

Kafkai checks before it charges. If your balance cannot cover a call's fee, the call is refused before it runs. A call that is rejected — a project that already exists, a competitor that is already there, an error of any kind — is never charged at all, and nothing appears on your ledger for it. There are no refunds because there is never anything to refund.

Reading the usage report

Every metered response ends with a _usage object:

"_usage": {
  "tool": "kafkai_get_catchup_keywords",
  "rows_returned": 20,
  "base_cost": 1,
  "row_cost": 2,
  "total_cost": 3,
  "balance_remaining": 997
}

This is the authoritative record of what a call cost — agents can report it to you directly, and you can ask at any time:

How many Kafkai credits do I have left, and what did I spend them on?

That question maps to kafkai_get_credit_balance, which returns the balance, lifetime totals, and the last ten transactions with their per-call breakdowns.

Watching usage on the web

The dashboard opens on your current balance, and lists the last seven days of activity below it — one row per tool call, with the tool name and cost. The activity page holds the full ledger, page by page, and lifetime totals live on the account page.

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