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You pay per call, from a prepaid balance. There is no subscription and no monthly minimum. Every new account starts with $5 of balance, with no card needed, which is enough for 500 commodity calls.

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Price per call

Each endpoint has one flat price per call, however many results it returns. Your balance is kept in credits: 1,000 credits = $1.00. Commodity and branded-food data comes from free USDA feeds. Shopify data costs more because Orbbit collects it from storefronts itself.

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What you’re charged for

  • Only calls that succeed. A call that returns an error (400, 401, 402, 403, 404 or 5xx) costs nothing.
  • One price per call. Asking for 100 metrics in one call to GET /v1/commodities/prices costs the same $0.01 as asking for one. So batch where you can.
  • Calls from the API Reference and AI assistants too. The Try it button and the Data MCP connection send real calls, charged like any other.

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When a call is refused

A call is refused with status 402 and error type insufficient_balance before any data is read if either of these would be exceeded:
  • Your balance. The message is Insufficient balance.
  • The key’s monthly spend budget, set per key under API Keys. The message is Monthly spend cap reached.
A refused call costs nothing. Retrying it fails the same way until you top up or raise the key’s budget.

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Cap what a key can spend

Every API key has a Spend budget (USD): the most it may spend in a calendar month (UTC). Set it when you create the key, and change it any time from API Keys. The budget still applies when auto-recharge is on, so a key can never spend past it. See Authentication.

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Top up your balance

Open Balance in the console and click Top Up. Pick 50,50, 100, 250or250 or 500, or enter any amount from 10to10 to 50,000, then pay by card through Stripe. The credits are added as soon as the payment goes through, and the card is saved for auto-recharge.

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Auto-recharge

Auto-recharge tops up your balance for you, so calls don’t start failing with 402 because it ran low.
  1. Open Balance and, next to auto-recharge, click Manage.
  2. Tick Automatically recharge when my balance runs low.
  3. Set **Recharge amount ()∗∗,theamounttoaddeachtime,from)**, the amount to add each time, from 10 to $50,000.
  4. Set **When balance drops below ()∗∗,thelevelthattriggersit,from)**, the level that triggers it, from 1 to $50,000.
  5. Click Save.
Auto-recharge needs a saved card. A top-up saves the card it’s paid with, or click Save Card in the same window. How it behaves:
  • It checks right after each charged call, and once a day, so it also catches a balance that dropped for another reason, such as a refund.
  • It charges once at a time. Many calls finishing together never trigger more than one recharge.
  • If your card is declined, auto-recharge switches itself off so it doesn’t keep retrying. Update your card and turn it back on.

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See what you’ve spent

The console’s Usage page shows your spend by key and by endpoint, day by day. Logs lists every call with the route it called, what it sent, and what it cost.