Billing & Credits
How the credits system works and a guide to pricing tiers.
Credit System
Crowdee uses a pre-paid credit model. Credits are stored as balance_cents on your organization and deducted when pipeline runs complete successfully. Runs that fail before producing a verdict are not charged.
If your organization's balance reaches zero, new verification runs will be blocked until credits are added. In-progress runs are not affected.
Check your current balance at any time by fetching your organization:
curl https://api.crowdee.ai/v2/organizations/{orgId} \
-H "X-API-Key: crw_YOUR_API_KEY"The balance_cents field in the response is the remaining credit in euro cents (e.g. 4250 = €42.50).
Pricing Tiers
Free
1 image verification per IP per 24 hours. No sign-up required — available via the web demo at crowdee.ai. Not available through the API.
Pay-as-you-go
From €0.05 per verification. No commitment required. Top up any amount via PayPal. Ideal for teams starting out or with variable workloads.
Managed
Custom-scoped fixed-fee engagements with dedicated support. Suited for newsrooms and enterprises with predictable monthly volumes.
Enterprise
Annual agreements with negotiated quotas, priority processing, and SLAs. Contact sales@crowdee.ai to discuss.
Crowd Labor Costs
Pipelines that include crowd stages (Tier 2) involve real human workers. These stages are billed separately from the AI-only processing fee, at approximately €15 per worker-hour plus a 40% platform fee.
Actual cost per run varies based on:
- Number of crowd stages in the pipeline
- Minimum required responses per stage (
minResponses) - Whether the pipeline requires expert or general workers
- Crowd availability and response time at the time of the run
Tier 2 pipelines such as verify-video-full can involve up to 120 minutes of crowd labor per run. Estimate costs carefully before running these pipelines at scale. Use the GET /v2/pipelines/catalog/{slug} endpoint to inspect the crowd stage configuration of any pipeline before starting a run.
Indicative Cost by Pipeline Tier
| Tier | Examples | Approx. cost per run |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 (AI-only) | verify-image-metadata, verify-audio-technical, verify-video-technical, verify-text-coherence, verify-document-provenance | €0.05 – €0.20 |
| Tier 2 (AI + Crowd) | verify-image-deep, verify-video-full, verify-audio-deepfake, verify-news-article, verify-social-post | €2 – €15 |
| Tier 3 (Context / Multi-file) | verify-url-credibility, verify-identity-claim, verify-multimedia-cross-modal | €0.05 – €8 |
These are estimates. Actual costs depend on crowd response times, pipeline configuration, and the complexity of the material being verified.
Topping Up
Add credits in the dashboard at Settings → Billing → Add Credits via PayPal. Credits are applied to your organization immediately after payment is confirmed.
For invoiced top-ups on Managed or Enterprise plans, contact sales@crowdee.ai.
VAT on Top-Ups
Self-service PayPal top-ups automatically add 19% German VAT when your organization's billing address is in Germany — the net amount, VAT, and total charged are shown before you confirm payment via PayPal. Organizations billed outside Germany are not taxed automatically today.
Only the net amount is converted into credits; VAT is never itself convertible to credits. A Lexware-generated invoice is issued automatically for every successful top-up and is linked from its entry in the credit ledger.
For Managed and Enterprise plans, the applicable tax treatment — including the EU reverse-charge mechanism where a valid VAT ID is provided — is confirmed in your quote rather than calculated automatically.
Transactions API
List all credit transactions for your organization:
curl https://api.crowdee.ai/v2/transactions \
-H "X-API-Key: crw_YOUR_API_KEY"Check the current balance directly:
curl https://api.crowdee.ai/v2/transactions/balance \
-H "X-API-Key: crw_YOUR_API_KEY"Each transaction record includes the amount, a description of what triggered it (top-up, pipeline run, refund), and a timestamp.
Credit Ledger
The credit ledger is the complete, append-only history of every event that has moved your organization's balance — top-ups, job funding and refunds, reward adjustments, AI-evaluation and pipeline charges, and any manual credit grants. Each entry carries the resulting balance, so you can reconstruct your balance at any point in time.
curl https://api.crowdee.ai/v2/credit-ledger \
-H "X-API-Key: crw_YOUR_API_KEY"Filter by entry type with ?type=:
| Type | Meaning |
|---|---|
paypal_charge | Successful PayPal top-up. |
paypal_refund | PayPal refund. |
job_funded | Credits blocked when a crowd job was created or cloned. |
job_refunded | Unused blocked credits returned when a job was archived. |
job_reward_adjusted_debit / job_reward_adjusted_credit | Balance change from updating a job's rewardCredits or maxRepetitionsPerVariant. |
ai_evaluation_funded | Credits blocked for an AI output evaluation batch. |
verification_run_charged | Credits charged for a verification pipeline run. |
lt_run_charged | Credits charged for a Language Technology pipeline run. |
manual_credit_grant | A credit grant issued by Crowdee support — never invoiced. |
Each paypal_charge entry with a generated invoice exposes a receipt link:
curl https://api.crowdee.ai/v2/credit-ledger/{entryId}/receipt \
-H "X-API-Key: crw_YOUR_API_KEY"This redirects to the hosted invoice. Entries without an invoice — everything except successful top-ups — return 404.
Language Technology pipeline runs did not previously consume credits. Every LT pipeline now has a costCredits value (see LT Pipelines) and is charged the same way as verification runs.
How is this guide?