Developer Credits

Paid users receive 1,000 credits per internal month. Credits do not roll over.

Quarterly and half-year subscriptions still receive 1,000 credits one internal month at a time.

Rankings cost 1 credit per actual 20 items; outlier search costs 2; found video detail costs 1; verify and balance cost 0.

The server validates, reserves the maximum cost, executes, and settles once using the larger of all_data.items.length and filter_data.items.length; the two sets are never added together for billing. The difference is refunded atomically.

Empty results, not found, 304, invalid requests, auth errors, rate limits, and server errors cost 0.

These are the current billing rules for every public Developer Platform V1 REST endpoint. Ranking and search endpoints settle once using the larger actual item count from all_data and filter_data; the two counts are not added and billing does not use the requested limit directly.

limit defaults to 20, with a minimum of 1 and maximum of 50. The actual item count is max(all_data.items.length, filter_data.items.length). Chinese and hot-today rankings use ceil(actual items ÷ 20) × 1; outlier search uses ceil(actual items ÷ 20) × 2.

For example, if limit=50 returns only 3 Chinese ranking items, the final cost is 1; if outlier search returns 3, the cost is 2. The maximum is reserved first, then the actual result is settled and the difference refunded atomically.

REST API and MCP use the same credit account and settlement rules.

Health checks, billing lookups, and key management in the web console do not consume Developer Credits. /control/v1/* is a signed internal interface between the ShortsMonkey website and Core API and must not be called directly by regular developers.

A cache hit is not automatically free: hot today is still billed by actual returned items when the server cache is used. Only the cases below settle to 0.

Every successful public API response returns the current cost, remaining balance, and credit-period end through X-Credits-Cost, X-Credits-Remaining, and X-Credits-Period-End.

The JSON fields credits.cost, credits.remaining, and credits.period_ends_at provide the same information. Use the response’s actual cost.