Pricing
Free to start, free to scale to real prototypes. In production, everything is one currency — credits (1 credit = $0.0001) — and a combined thing always costs the sum of its parts. No per-pack fees. No markup on free upstream APIs.
A grounded answer for about half a cent
Ask ask_pipeworx a question and it routes to the right live source, runs the
call, and returns a cited answer. On credits that typically costs
~$0.005 — the request fee plus the actual inference, priced at what it
cost us. The same grounded answer assembled through a web-search API stack runs
$0.16–$1.20 per answer.
Methodology and per-question receipts: Frontier models went 100% correct with Pipeworx and 63% with web search — 20 questions, 4 models, 3 ways (blind-graded).
A dollar of data a day, every day
A free account is 200 tool calls a day. At the government-and-open-data rate below, that is $1.00 of data — and it renews every morning rather than running out once. Without signing up at all you get 50 a day, $0.25 worth, on the same full catalog.
Anonymous
For trying things out.
- 50 tool calls / day — $0.25 of data, daily
- All 5,929 tools across 1544 packs
- No signup, no API keys
- 24-hour memory TTL
- Full MCP protocol (Tools + Resources + Prompts)
Registered (Free)
For real prototypes.
- 200 tool calls / day — $1.00 of data, daily
- Everything in Anonymous
- Persistent
remember/recallmemory - Bearer token for stable cross-session identity
- Usage dashboard at /account
- Add credits to keep going past the daily cap
Paid
Data is priced by what it costs us to serve. Government and open sources are cheapest, standard databases next, partner sources above that, and a small number of premium sources bill at their real cost plus a margin. A subscription locks a lower rate card for every category.
| Pay as you go | $49/month | $99/month | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Government & open data | $0.005 | $0.003 | $0.001 |
| Standard databases | $0.010 | $0.005 | $0.002 |
| Partner sources | $0.020 | $0.015 | $0.012 |
| Premium sources | cost × 1.5 | cost × 1.3 | cost × 1.2 |
| AI services coming soon | cost × 1.5 | cost × 1.3 | cost × 1.2 |
Your bill is whichever is larger: the subscription or your usage. The fee is a minimum, credited against what you use — never charged on top. $49 covers 16,333 government requests, $99 covers 99,000, and past that you keep paying the same locked rate.
So $49 pays for itself at about 9,800 requests a month, and $99 at about 33,000. Below those, pay-as-you-go is cheaper and you should stay on it.
Premium is decided per request, not per source: most providers bill us per unit, so a one-page crawl is a partner request and a twenty-page crawl is a premium one. Anything above $0.012 of provider cost bills at cost × your markup, and we tell your agent the price before it spends. AI services are optional and not available yet — nothing changes unless you turn them on.
Three things you can buy — a combo is the sum of its parts
1 · Requests
One tool call to any of the 5,929 tools. Volume-tiered by calendar month, priced marginally — your cheap band never re-prices your early calls, and heavy volume keeps the old $0.001 rate. A call that comes back with no data isn't billed, whether you made it yourself or an answer made it for you.
2 · Answers
ask_pipeworx-class tools run real inference to route and ground your
question. An answer costs the measured inference at 1.5× what it costs us, plus one
request for each data lookup it actually ran — a question answered from four sources
bills four, and a lookup that returned nothing bills none. Cheap routing means a cheap
answer — you pay what it actually took, not a flat guess.
3 · Metered sources
A few packs front vendors that bill us per unit — per email found, per page, per market. Those settle at the vendor's real unit cost times your bracket's markup (×1.5 down to ×1.2 by monthly volume), floored at $0.01, itemized in your ledger. Bring your own key for any of them and we charge nothing extra.
Bring your own keys for paid upstream sources
Some packs wrap upstream APIs that require their own paid keys — FRED, ATTOM,
Alpha Vantage Premium, Altos, and others. Pipeworx doesn't mark those up. Pass your own
key per call via the _apiKey argument and you pay the upstream provider
directly. The Pipeworx tier still counts against your daily/billed limit.
For sources that are free upstream (SEC, FDA, FRED Basic, ClinicalTrials, RxNorm, USPTO,
Census, BLS, OpenAlex, EPA, NOAA, and ~280 others), no _apiKey is needed —
Pipeworx covers all the upstream traffic.
Vertical bundles include managed paid sources
The Pipeworx Verticals (Housing, FinTech, Pharma, GovCon, Trade, Green, Agri) bundle packs by domain and include managed access to paid upstream sources relevant to that vertical — so subscribers don't need to bring their own keys for ATTOM, Altos, etc.
Vertical subscriptions are priced per-vertical and stack on top of your account tier. See individual vertical pages for current pricing.
Common questions
What counts as a "request"?
One MCP tool invocation through the gateway — an actual question asked of an
actual source. Setting up the connection is free: initialize,
tools/list, resources/list and keepalive pings run on
their own budget and never draw down your daily limit or your credits.
Do I pay for a search that finds nothing?
No. A call that succeeds but returns no data is refunded in full — the credits, the daily-limit slot and the volume slot — and the same applies to each lookup inside an answer, so a four-source answer where one source came back empty bills three. The one exception is the metered sources above: those vendors bill us for a miss, so a no-match there still costs its unit price.
What happens when I hit my daily limit?
Anonymous callers get an HTTP 429 until UTC midnight. Signed-in accounts with credits keep going seamlessly at the request rates above; without credits you get a clear message with your options. Nothing is ever charged silently past a limit you didn't fund.
Do answers cost more than requests?
Only by what the inference actually cost. A routed answer on the standard model adds
about a tenth of a cent; deeper modes (ask_pipeworx_grounded,
deep_research) run more model calls and settle at their measured cost —
itemized, never estimated in our favor.
What if a call fails?
Errors come back structured — a retry hint, the upstream status, and what to try
instead — so your agent can route around the failure instead of burning calls on it.
Every pack's live health is on /status, and persistent breakage
reported via pipeworx_feedback is reviewed daily.
Can I cap my spend?
Yes — every account has a daily spend ceiling (it starts at $10/day and grows with account history, or set it yourself at /account), and auto-refill is off unless you turn it on.
Where do I see what I've used?
Signed-in accounts have a usage dashboard at /account showing calls, top packs, error rate, current-month volume and bracket, and the full credit ledger.