Charged-on-success
The billing rule that a capture only spends credits when it actually completes with a result, a failed acquisition or a driver outage costs nothing. It matters because a metered API without this rule punishes exactly the failures that are least the customer’s fault, and it makes fail-loud behavior (an honest error instead of a fabricated mock) commercially safe to enforce.
In AI Search API
Every surface’s per-capture credit cost is published on the pricing page, and every one of them follows the same rule: a DRIVER_UNAVAILABLE failure, a timeout, or an absent surface (surfacePresent:false, warning surface_absent) draws zero credits. Absence-is-data and charged-on-success are two sides of one design decision. Because an honest empty result costs nothing, there is never a financial incentive to fabricate one instead of reporting it truthfully. Only a capture that returns real content and completes as status:"completed" ever debits the balance shown on your dashboard.
Related terms
See it in the product
Every definition here is enforced in the Envelope contract. Run a capture and read the fields yourself.