What an SEO data lookup actually costs

Nobody sells SEO data at cost, and nobody should. But almost nobody shows you the cost either, and that is a choice rather than a necessity.

The unit is the interesting part

The price of a lookup matters less than what it is a price for. Four different units show up in the same product, and confusing them is how metered billing goes wrong.

Per keyword. Keyword metrics — search volume, difficulty, cost per click — are billed per keyword plus a fixed fee per request, because that is how the vendor bills them: netweft charges 120 credits for the request and 1.2 a keyword. Predictable, and it scales with the thing you can see on screen.

Per results page. A rank check buys search results ten at a time, and each page of ten is billed. Reading the top 100 is ten pages, so the depth a tracker reads is its price.

Per request. Some endpoints charge for the call, not its contents. The Google Ads endpoints netweft falls back to for countries the Labs dataset does not cover are like this: one keyword and a thousand keywords cost the same.

Per page. A crawl is billed per page fetched, which is the only unit that makes sense for work your own infrastructure does.

Mix these up and you get the classic metered-billing failure: a per-unit reservation held against a per-request charge. Reserve one credit for a one-keyword refresh that will actually cost five hundred, and the difference comes out of somebody’s margin — or worse, out of a customer who thought they had budget left.

netweft’s rate card names the basis on every line for exactly this reason.

Reserve, then settle

The order of operations matters more than the number.

A naive implementation runs the call, reads the invoice, and bills you. That works until a workspace is out of money, at which point you have spent real cash on behalf of someone who cannot pay for it.

netweft reserves first. Before a paid call runs, the estimated cost is held against the workspace’s balance. A workspace with no credits is refused before the money is spent rather than billed afterwards. When the call returns, the real cost is read off the vendor’s response envelope and the reservation is settled against it — so you are charged what the vendor charged, and the estimate never becomes the price.

For the AI operations the reservation is explicitly a ceiling: the most a chat turn can cost at the configured model caps. A turn that answers straight away settles for a fraction of it. A long one cannot exceed it.

Why credits and not dollars

One credit is $0.0001 of raw vendor cost. Ten thousand credits is exactly one dollar of vendor spend, which was the whole point of choosing that number: it makes every margin question legible without a calculator.

Credits also separate two things that a dollar figure fuses together. What the data cost is one fact. What you paid for access is another. A plan grants credits and access, and a top-up buys credits alone: the same per credit as Pro, whose price also pays for the platform, and dearer than Studio and Agency, which is where the volume discount lives.

The one to watch

If you take one number from the rate card, take the performance check.

A crawled page costs 1 credit. A Lighthouse pass on that same page — the Core Web Vitals measurement — costs 50, because it is a vendor call. Run on every page of a five-hundred-page crawl it would cost many times the crawl, so netweft measures a sample instead: one page per URL shape, at most 10 pages an audit.

That is why it is opt-in per audit rather than a default, and why the number is printed on the pricing page rather than discovered in a ledger three days later. The arithmetic on a real five-hundred-page run is in what a 500-page crawl costs. A metered product that surprises you has failed at the only thing metering is for.