Prospecting: 5 bulk_dr calls of 2,000 domains, weekly
5
260
$0.03
0.03%
Rival watch: 10 intersect calls with 4 domains each, weekly
10
1,040
$0.10
0.1%
What would we do with the whole $100?
Mostly nothing. That is the honest finding.
The credit is far larger than the API spend of a typical marketing automation, so the real constraints are your platform's task or operation limits and how much junk you pull. If you ran all four setups above for a full year you would use about 30,000 credits, three dollars, and keep the other $97.
The cases that do eat credit are the wide ones: search and keyword at 3 credits, deep paging with 50 pages of 1,000 rows, or a loop with a bug in it. A bug that fires 100,000 refdomains calls costs $20, which is the best argument for logging _credits after every run.
Our own habit, if this were our account: keep $20 as an untouched floor, use the free actions for anything triggered by a person, and give each scheduled workflow its own key so one runaway loop is easy to find.
Reading the table
The numbers are small on purpose. Link data is cheap per call.
Swap in your own counts. Each row uses real per-call prices from this API and invented usage, so swap in your own counts. The freelancer line is 12 sites times three 2-credit pulls a week, 72 credits, over 52 weeks. The prospecting line is five 1-credit calls a week, since a single bulk_dr call can carry 2,000 domains.
What does the table leave out? Your automation platform. A Zap that runs 36 times a week uses Zapier tasks, and a Make scenario that iterates over 800 rows burns operations, as shown in the Make recipe. Those bills are usually larger than the data bill, so budget them first. The Zapier recipe counts tasks step by step.
A last sanity check: the free tier of actions matters more than the credit for many readers. If your whole use is lead lookups through overview, you may never touch the balance at all, and the $100 sits there as a cushion for the day you add a paid pull.
Free first, paid when it is worth it
Question
Free action
Paid action worth the credits
How strong is this one site?
overview
refdomains for who links
Which site is better among three?
overview x3
compare for 1 credit
Is my list any good?
Nothing at this scale
bulk_dr for 1 credit
Where do rivals get links we lack?
Nothing
intersect for 2 credits
Where it falls short
It is link data, not an SEO suite
If you also need keyword research, rank tracking or a daily-fresh crawl, Ahrefs or Semrush are the fuller products. Their API units come bundled into subscriptions that start at $129 a month for 200,000 units, with at least 50 units per request, which is the gap this API was built to fill.