Question 1

What are credits in SurfSense?

Accepted Answer

Credits are a single prepaid balance shown in dollars that powers everything in SurfSense: platform connector calls, web crawls, document processing, and premium AI models. New accounts start with $5 of free credit. There is one number to watch, and it only moves when you actually use the product.

Question 2

How does Pay As You Go work?

Accepted Answer

There is no monthly subscription. Start with $5 of free credit, and when you need more, add any amount. $1 buys exactly $1 of credit, added to your balance immediately. You can enable automatic refills when your balance runs low, and turn them off any time.

Question 3

What happens if I run out of credit?

Accepted Answer

SurfSense checks your balance before every billable call, so your wallet can never go negative. When credit runs out, connector calls, crawls, premium model requests, and document processing pause until you top up. Free models and connectors that do not consume credit keep working.

Question 4

Do failed scrapes or crawls cost anything?

Accepted Answer

No. Platform connectors bill per item actually returned, and web crawls bill per page successfully fetched. A request that errors, times out, or comes back empty is not charged. You pay for data you receive, not for attempts.

Question 5

How are platform connectors billed?

Accepted Answer

Each platform connector meters per item returned: a Reddit post or comment, a Google Search results page, a Google Maps place or review, a YouTube video or comment. Rates are fractions of a cent per item and are debited from your credit balance after the call succeeds, so your $5 of free credit covers hundreds of items.

Question 6

How much does web crawling cost?

Accepted Answer

Web crawls are billed per successfully fetched page at a fraction of a cent, so $1 of credit covers hundreds of pages. Pages that fail to load are never charged. Crawled pages can feed your agents directly or be indexed into your knowledge base for later questions.

Question 7

Does the REST API cost the same as the MCP server?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Whether your own app calls a connector with your SurfSense API key or your agent calls it as a tool through the MCP server, it is the same endpoint, the same per-item rate, and the same credit balance. There is no separate API plan or seat fee.

Question 8

What can I add to the knowledge base?

Accepted Answer

You can upload files directly or sync documents from Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox. Crawled pages can also be indexed for later questions. Document files are billed per page processed; connecting the drives themselves costs nothing.

Question 9

How is credit used for premium AI?

Accepted Answer

The same balance pays for premium AI models like GPT-5.5, Claude Sonnet 5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro, plus over 100 more via OpenRouter, and for premium features such as image generation, podcasts, and video presentations. Each request debits the actual USD provider cost, so cheaper models bill proportionally less.

Question 10

Do agents and automations cost extra?

Accepted Answer

No. There is no add-on fee for agents or automations. A scheduled research brief or an event-triggered alert draws from the same credit balance: connector items and crawled pages at their per-unit rates, and model usage at provider cost. A workflow that uses free models and no scraping costs nothing.

Question 11

What can the agents actually do?

Accepted Answer

You describe the job in plain English and SurfSense sets up the agent, no code needed. Agents can watch any page for changes, track mentions on Reddit and YouTube, monitor Google rankings and Maps reviews, then turn what they find into briefs and alerts, and write results back to Notion, Slack, Linear, and Jira.

Question 12

How much does document processing cost?

Accepted Answer

Document processing is billed per page from your credit balance. Basic mode costs $0.001 per page and Premium mode costs $0.01 per page, with Premium using advanced extraction for complex financial, medical, and legal layouts. Pages in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files are estimated automatically, and every file uses at least 1 page.

Question 13

Which file types use credit?

Accepted Answer

Only document files that need processing: PDFs, Word documents, presentations, spreadsheets, ebooks, and images. Plain text, code, Markdown, CSV, HTML, audio, and video files are indexed free. Duplicate documents are detected automatically and never charged twice.

Question 14

If I delete a document, do I get my credit back?

Accepted Answer

No. Deleting a document removes it from your knowledge base, but the credit it used is not refunded. Credit tracks your total usage over time, not how much is currently stored, so once credit is spent it stays spent even if you later remove the document.

Question 15

Is the self-hosted version really free and unlimited?

Accepted Answer

Yes. SurfSense is open source, and the default self-hosted configuration ships with all credit billing switched off. Scraping, crawling, document processing, and agent runs are limited only by your own infrastructure and the model provider keys you bring.

Question 16

What is the difference between self-hosted and cloud?

Accepted Answer

Both run the same platform: connectors, agents, automations, and the MCP server. Cloud is zero-setup with managed infrastructure and metered pay-as-you-go credit. Self-hosted runs on your machines with your own model keys, keeps competitive research fully in-house, and leaves billing under your control.

SurfSense Pricing

Frequently Asked Questions

Credits & Pay As You Go

Connector & Scraping Pricing

Premium AI, Agents & Automations

Documents & Knowledge Base

Self-Hosting