6 min readJustAPI

File API pricing: tiers, credit and the no-charge rules

How JustAPI prices PDF, image and spreadsheet calls: three volume tiers, 1 USD of sign-up credit, and the cases where a call costs nothing.

A receipt marked no charge in front of three volume tier bars of rising height

A file API is easy to budget when the price is clear. The question is not only what one call costs. It is how the price changes with volume, what you pay for a failed call, and what happens when a file cannot be made smaller.

This article sets out the JustAPI price rules for the three families of calls: PDF, image and spreadsheet. The numbers come from the price table in the service, and each one is shown at the first volume tier, the price for a new account.

Pay per call, from prepaid credit

There is no monthly fee and no minimum. You add credit and each call draws from it. Every new account gets 1 USD of credit with no card. Deposits start at 5 USD. An account funded in the last 90 days also gets 1 USD on day 30 and on day 60 after the deposit.

Free credit timeline for a new account1 USD of credit at sign-up with no card, a first deposit from 5 USD, then 1 USD on day 30 and on day 60 after a deposit made in the last 90 days.$1.00Sign-upno cardfrom $5.00Deposityour first top-up$1.00Day 30after the deposit$1.00Day 60after the depositDay 30 and day 60 apply to a deposit made in the last 90 days.
The sign-up credit is yours to start with. Monthly credit follows a deposit, on the days shown.

Credit is counted in millionths of a dollar. Only the credit you paid for can be refunded.

Three tiers for each operation

Each operation has three volume tiers. Units are counted per account and per calendar month in UTC. The first 1,000 units in a month are charged at tier 1, the next at tier 2, and the rest at tier 3. The price falls as your volume rises.

Operation Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3
PDF compression, input up to 25 MB $0.030 $0.025 $0.020
PDF compression, input 25 to 200 MB $0.060 $0.050 $0.040
PDF merge, result up to 25 MB $0.015 $0.012 $0.010
PDF merge, result 25 to 200 MB $0.040 $0.035 $0.030
Image optimization, per image $0.0012 $0.0010 $0.0008
Image batch, per image that succeeded $0.0012 $0.0010 $0.0008
JSON to Excel, per file $0.008 $0.006 $0.005
JSON to Excel, per 1,000 cells $0.00003 $0.000025 $0.00002
PDF compression, up to 25 MB: price by monthly volume tierThree columns with heights drawn to scale from the tier prices in site data: tier 1 is the highest, tier 2 lower and tier 3 lowest. Each tier applies only to the units inside its range of the month.PDF compression, up to 25 MBPrice per PDF, by monthly tier$0.030Tier 11 to 1,000$0.025Tier 21,001 to 10,000$0.020Tier 3above 10,000
PDF compression up to 25 MB, price per document by monthly tier. Each tier is drawn to scale.

The quality verification add-on for PDF compression costs $0.008 at tier 1. The batch has no surcharge. The per-file and per-cell charges for spreadsheets add together.

The PDF merge price depends on the size of the result, not on the size of the inputs. The compression price depends on the size of the input file.

A worked example

Suppose a month has 1,200 successful image optimizations. The first 1,000 are charged at tier 1, and the next 200 at tier 2.

  • 1,000 at $0.0012 is $1.20.
  • 200 at $0.0010 is $0.20.
  • Total: $1.40.

The tiers are graduated. Only the units above each break are charged at the lower price, so a 1,200th image does not reprice the first thousand.

When a call costs nothing

Your charge should match work that helped you. These are the cases where the bill is $0.00:

  • The PDF could not be made smaller. You get your original file back.
  • The optimized image is no smaller than the source. It is still returned, and nothing is charged.
  • An image in a batch failed. You pay for the images that succeeded, and one bad image never fails the others.
  • A merge failed. The merge is all or nothing. If any source is unreadable, no file is returned and nothing is charged.
  • Your request was invalid. Any 4xx response costs nothing.
  • Something broke on the service's side. Any 5xx response costs nothing.
Cases where a call costs nothingA receipt listing six cases where the charge is $0.00: an image no smaller than its source, a failed image in a batch, a merge where any source failed, a PDF that could not be made smaller, any 4xx and any 5xx.Nothing to pay forImage no smaller than its source$0.00One image in a batch failed$0.00Merge where any source failed$0.00PDF that could not be made smaller$0.00Invalid request (any 4xx)$0.00Service error (any 5xx)$0.00Total charged$0.00NO CHARGE
The bill reads $0.00 whenever the work did not happen or did not help.

Spreadsheet calls are charged only once the file is generated and uploaded. A 4xx or 5xx on a spreadsheet call costs nothing.

Budget before you scale

Multiply your expected monthly units by the tier-1 price for each operation, then subtract the tier discounts you will reach. A workflow that compresses 1,500 PDFs of up to 25 MB in a month pays the tier-1 price for the first 1,000 and the tier-2 price for the next 500. Run the numbers for each operation separately, because a single workflow often calls more than one of them.

Add a margin for retries and for test calls. Retries that reuse an idempotency key are not charged twice, but a test that creates new jobs is. Keep a separate test key for experiments, and watch its spend.

Check the ledger

Responses include a billing object with charged_micros and balance_micros. Store those values with your job. When you need the balance right after a charge, read the ledger rather than the account, because the account view can lag by up to a minute.

The GET /v1/ledger endpoint lists each movement. A reconciliation against your own job records is the simplest way to find a difference.

Results are short-lived

Results from the API are deleted automatically after 24 hours, or at once when you acknowledge the download. Free tool results are deleted within the hour. Store the file in your own system if you need to keep it. The service is not an archive.

What the numbers came from

Two measured runs show the cost in practice. A 59-page photo report went from 27.2 MB to 5.1 MB, which is 81% smaller, and it cost $0.04 at the time of the run. A batch of 250 images finished in 23 seconds and cost $0.20 at the time. Prices change as the price table changes, so calculate your own volume with the pricing page before you set a budget.

Start with a test budget

Start free at app.justapi.tech. New accounts get 1 USD of credit with no card. Run a small set of your own files, check the billing object for each call, and confirm that the rules above match what you see. Then add a deposit when you are ready to run the real volume.

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