Kaizen #34 - API Credits

Hello everyone!

Welcome back to another post in the Kaizen series.

We will be discussing an interesting topic this week - API Credits.

In this post, we will cover the following.

1. What are API credits?

2. Add-on credits and pricing details

3. How are the credits deducted?

1. What are API credits?

Zoho CRM consists of different editions to cater to its wide range of customers. Each edition in Zoho CRM has a limit associated with it, called API Credits. The system uses API credits to track API usage. Whenever you make an API call, the system deducts the credits from your account. The credits deduction is based on the type of API Call, the intensiveness of the performance, and the memory usage of the operations involved in the API calls.

The following table shows the allocation of credits for each edition of Zoho CRM.

Edition	Allowed Credits	Maximum Credits
Free	5000 credits	5000 credits
Standard/Starter	5,000 credits + (Number of User licenses x 250) + Add-on credits	100,000 credits
Professional	10,000 credits + (Number of User licenses x 500) + Add-on credits	500,000 credits
Enterprise/Zoho One/CRM Plus	15,000 credits + (Number of User licenses x 1000) + Add-on credits	1,000,000 credits
Ultimate	15,000 credits + (Number of User licenses x 2000) + Add-on credits	Unlimited

The available API credits will be the minimum of the calculated allowed credit limit (above table) and the corresponding edition's maximum credit limit. For example, if the organization is in the Professional Edition and the user licenses are 1000, the total credits would become 510,000. However, the maximum API credit limit will still remain 500,000 (minimum between 500,000 and 510,000).

2. Add-on credits and pricing details

In certain cases, organizations may need extra credits (besides the available credits) to perform more API operations.Zoho CRM offers add-on credits to handle additional credit requirements. If an organization requires more API credits than the allowed limit for its edition, you can contact support@zohocrm.com and purchase extra credits.

The following table gives the pricing details for different credit slabs.

Add-on Credits per 24 hours	Price in $ per 1000 Credits
First 25,000	0.14
Next 75,000	0.06
Next 150,000	0.05
Next 250,000	0.025
Next 500,000	0.012

An illustration on the calculation of price for add-on credits:

Consider that an organization wants to purchase 75,000 add-on credits. For the first 25,000 credits, the price will be $0.14 and for the next 50,000 credits, it will be $0.6, for every 1000 credits, respectively.

Hence, the price for a 24-hour period will be:

For the first 25,000 credits = (25,000*0.14)/1000

For the next 50,000 credits = (50,000*0.06)/1000

Total credits = 3500/1000 + 3000/1000 = $6.5.

Thus, the price per month will be $6.5*30 = $195

Note:

1. If you want to purchase 100,000 credits, then you will be charged a total of $300 per month ($105 for the first 25000 + $195 for the next 75,000).

2. You can purchase either a maximum of 500,000 extra credits or the difference between your edition's maximum credit limit and your current API limit, whichever is lower.

3. How are the credits deducted?

API credits are deducted based on a 24-hour rolling window from the start of the call.

The 24-hour rolling window starts when you make the first API call. The system frees the API credit used after the 24 hours of each API credit consumption.

Let us understand it better by an example. Refer to the image below. You can see that the user starts with 5000 credits and exhausts it by 18:00 GMT. Furthermore, by 02:30 GMT the next day, the 500 credits that were used up, get credited to the account. Subsequently, by 06:30 GMT, the next day, 1500 credits will be credited to the account, and so on. This is how the 24-hour rolling window works.

The number of credits deducted depends on the intensity and the memory consumption of the API call. The "intensity" varies with the type of the API. For instance, while a user makes a meta API call, only one credit is consumed from the available credits. However, when the user makes a bulk read or bulk write API call, it will cost around 50 or 500 credits accordingly.

The following table describes the number of credits deducted based on the type of API call.

API Call	Number of Credits Deducted
Get Users/Roles/Profiles	1
Get list of Modules	1
Get Field Meta Data	1
Get Module Meta Data	1
Get IDs of deleted records	2
Get records with cvid parameter	3
Convert Lead	5
Add/Remove Tags to Multiple records	1 credit for every 50 records
Insert/Update/Upsert	1 credit for every 10 records
Bulk Read Initialize	50
Bulk Write Initialize	500
All other APIs	1

So, based on the type of API call a user makes, the associated credit is deducted from the available credits for the CRM edition.

When you exhaust your available credits, the system throws the "TOO MANY REQUESTS" error.

Sample Error Response:

{

"code": "TOO_MANY_REQUESTS",

"details": {},

"message": "Many requests fired than the allowed limit for the past 24 hours.",

"status": "error"

}

We hope you found this post useful. Let us know your thoughts in the comment section or reach us out at support@zohocrm.com.

Cheers!

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