Credits vs limits

Pipecorn meters usage with two separate mechanisms that are easy to confuse, partly because the GET /credits response uses the word “credits” for both. This page tells them apart so you know which one a request draws on, which one an error is about, and what actually unblocks you.

One-line version. A credit is a paid unit you spend on enrichment (emails, phones, company and people data). A limit is a quota bundled with your plan that caps how many profiles or companies you can extract per day or month. Buying credits never raises a limit, and a limit resetting never adds credits.

Side by side

	Enrichment credits	Plan limits
What it is	A prepaid balance owned by your workspace	Daily and monthly quotas included in your plan
What draws on it	Enrichment: waterfall email and phone, account and people enrichment, hiring and tech-stack lookups, WhatsApp validation	Extraction: pulling people profiles or importing companies from a search, a Sales Navigator URL, or a post
Unit	Credits per result (for example 3 per email, 30 per phone, 1 per enriched company)	One profile or one company per unit
How it goes down	Spent per successful result. A lookup that resolves nothing costs nothing	Consumed per extracted profile or imported company
How it goes back up	Buy credits, or wait for your plan renewal to add the plan’s monthly allocation	Resets automatically: daily quotas every day, the monthly company quota every month
How to get more	Top up at any time	Upgrade your plan, or contact support
Where to check	`credits.enrichment` in `GET /credits`, or `GET /credits_consumption` for a date range	`credits.daily_profile_scraping`, `credits.daily_company_import`, `credits.monthly_company_import` (remaining) and `limits.*` (ceiling) in `GET /credits`
Error when exhausted	`402 Payment Required`, `code: "insufficient_credits"`, with a `top_up_url`	`422 Unprocessable Entity`, message `"Can't proceed with the request. Plan limit reached."`

Preview endpoints (/leads/advanced_search/preview, /accounts/search/preview, /intents/accounts/stack/preview) draw on neither. They are free and never return either error.

Enrichment credits

Credits are the paid resource. Every endpoint that returns enriched data checks your balance before doing any work and charges only for what it actually returns:

Waterfall enrichment: 3 credits per email, 30 credits per phone (single, bulk, synchronous)
Enrich account and Enrich people: 1 credit per resolved company or person
Company hiring: 1 credit per job returned
Company stack, hiring intent and tech-stack search (3 credits per imported company)
WhatsApp validation

When the balance is too low the request is rejected up front with 402 and nothing is spent, enqueued, or imported. Top up and replay the same request. Credits belong to the workspace, so every member and every API key spends from the same pool.

Plan limits

Limits are quotas, not a balance. They come with your plan, reset on a fixed schedule, and cannot be bought one at a time. There are two of them:

Profile scraping (daily): how many people profiles you can extract per day. Drawn on by lead extraction, such as search leads by filters, extract leads from a Sales Navigator URL, leads in a company, and post engagers.
Company import (daily and monthly): how many companies you can import per day and per month. Drawn on by account extraction, such as search accounts by filters, extract accounts from a Sales Navigator URL, lookalike companies, and growth signals.

When a quota is used up the endpoint answers 422 with "Can't proceed with the request. Plan limit reached.". Wait for the reset or move to a plan with a higher allowance. Buying credits does nothing here.

In GET /credits the remaining quotas live under the credits key, next to credits.enrichment, and the field descriptions call them “credits”. Read them as remaining quota for the current period, not as a spendable balance. Only credits.enrichment is money you can top up. The limits object gives each quota’s ceiling so you can compute how much of the period you have used.

{
  "credits": {
    "enrichment": 3000,
    "daily_profile_scraping": 1500,
    "daily_company_import": 1000,
    "monthly_company_import": 10000
  },
  "limits": {
    "daily_profile_scraping": 2500,
    "daily_company_import": 1000,
    "monthly_company_import": 10000
  }
}

In this example the workspace has 3,000 enrichment credits to spend, and can still extract 1,500 of its 2,500 daily profiles.

Two other “limits” that are not plan limits

Workspace weekly credit limit

A workspace admin can cap how many enrichment credits each member may spend per week. This is a spending ceiling on credits, not a quota on extraction. Hitting it returns 403 Forbidden with code: "workspace_limit_exceeded" and no top_up_url: the balance may be fine, so buying credits does not help. An admin raises the member’s weekly allowance, or the limit resets at the end of the week.

Rate limits

Requests per second or per minute, tracked per API key and per endpoint. Exceeding one returns 429 Too Many Requests. Rate limits are about request pacing and have nothing to do with credits or quotas; back off and retry.

Which one am I hitting?

Branch on the status code and, for 403, on the code field.

Response	What ran out	What unblocks it
`402` with `code: "insufficient_credits"`	Enrichment credit balance	Top up at `top_up_url`, or wait for plan renewal, then retry
`403` with `code: "workspace_limit_exceeded"`	Weekly credit spending cap for this member	Workspace admin raises the allowance, or the week resets
`403` with any other body	Nothing ran out: the API key lacks access to the endpoint	Use a key with the right permissions
`422` with `"Plan limit reached."`	Daily profile scraping or daily/monthly company import quota	Wait for the reset, or upgrade the plan
`429`	Request rate for this endpoint	Back off and retry

For the exact response bodies and the list of endpoints that return each code, see Credit and limit errors.

History. Until August 2026, enrich account and enrich people drew on the company import and profile scraping quotas and failed with 422 when they ran out. They are now priced in credits and answer 402 and 403 instead. See the changelog.

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Side by side

Enrichment credits

Plan limits

Two other “limits” that are not plan limits

Workspace weekly credit limit

Rate limits

Which one am I hitting?

​Side by side

​Enrichment credits

​Plan limits

​Two other “limits” that are not plan limits

​Workspace weekly credit limit

​Rate limits

​Which one am I hitting?

Side by side

Enrichment credits

Plan limits

Two other “limits” that are not plan limits

Workspace weekly credit limit

Rate limits

Which one am I hitting?