Usage & credits

Inventory requests use the funding available to your account: subscription allowances or prepaid credits. Your Billing page shows your current plan, allowance period and prepaid balance. A plan preview is not an active subscription.

All Projects share your account's credit balance and subscription allowances. Projects, Service Accounts and Credentials control access and identify usage; creating another one does not buy more capacity or create a separate balance.

Inspect private usage in Dashboard

Use Dashboard → Usage & Analytics to inspect usage and Billing to check your balance and available funding options. These documentation pages explain the rules without displaying your private account data.

Plan for limits

Treat documented rate and credit outcomes as explicit application states. Do not assume a successful request guarantees future capacity.

Check the operation's response headers and schema in the API Reference for charge and remaining-credit metadata. Response formats differ between V2 and legacy V1. Use the Dashboard for your account balance; a counter in one application cannot include all other applications' spending or outstanding reservations.

Subscription allowances

An active Inventory subscription has two separate allowances:

Refresh status reads use neither allowance. Complete Refresh reserves its maximum before starting, then settles the actual units and releases the remainder. Requests in progress can therefore reduce available capacity before they finish. Provider retries do not add to the charge for that operation.

Allowances belong to the paid period shown in Billing and do not roll over. A renewal payment must be verified before new paid allowances become available. Adding Projects, reopening checkout or retrying a completed operation does not refill the pool. Use the required idempotency key when retrying a request; a new key can create a separate operation.

Change your plan

Where Billing offers plan changes, review the amount, effective date and allowance effects before accepting. An upgrade can take effect during the current period after payment is verified. Existing usage stays counted; an upgrade does not reset the period's spending. A reduction is scheduled for renewal and preserves the current paid capacity until then. A quote or checkout confirmation alone is not proof that new capacity is active: check the resulting status in Billing.

Optional prepaid fallback

Inventory prepaid fallback is off by default and requires your explicit choice in Billing. For eligible subscription requests that exceed the available allowance, enabled fallback can use your existing prepaid balance. It does not restore subscription access or buy credits automatically. If fallback is off, or the balance cannot cover the request, handle the reported capacity or credit outcome before submitting more work.

One operation uses either allowance funding or prepaid funding; it is not charged against both. Your prepaid balance remains separate from your subscription allowances.

Inventory pricing

The following prices and credit reservations apply when an operation uses prepaid funding. Subscription-funded requests use the corresponding allowances described above. Inventory operations are priced by the work and state they provide:

Refresh reserves the published 125-credit maximum at acceptance because the final size is not trusted yet. Settlement releases unused credits. A 2,001-item completed inventory therefore costs 2 credits, not 125. Provider retries do not increase the charge. Confirmed private or not-found outcomes use the one-credit diagnostic minimum; SteamCall or upstream failures release the reservation.

Your balance has three values: available credits can be spent now, reserved credits are held for unfinished Complete Refresh requests, and total is available plus reserved. A reservation moves credits from available to reserved without counting them as consumed. Terminal settlement charges the final amount and releases the remainder.

Complete Refresh is not billed by Steam's raw request or retry count. Counting started 2,000-asset blocks gives you a stable rule for estimating its cost. Live Page stays page-priced because each call requests one Steam page. Compare the Inventory workflows before choosing which operation to use.

Keep billing evidence safe

Record the request ID and product code when your application needs audit evidence. Do not log API keys or entire payloads merely to investigate usage. Account-wide balance and usage views belong in the Dashboard.

Handle insufficient credits

Stop automated retries when a documented credit outcome occurs. Surface an account action to an authorized operator and keep unrelated public users away from private billing details.