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Bigdata.com has started to tokenize content consumption. New accounts do not need to worry about seats, yearly licenses or units: we tokenized the world’s premium content and charge per token consumed. The clearest place to visualize current usage is the Developer Playground Usage page (sign in with your Bigdata account). This guide explains how to monitor usage programmatically:
  • At the account level: organization-wide token consumption, quotas or credits
  • or per request: Each response includes a usage object with details about the usage of the request.
We encourage you to monitor usage and email us at support@bigdata.com if you would like assistance.

Account level

Send a GET request to the credits balance endpoint. Replace YOUR_API_KEY with your API key, which you can create at Developer Platform > API Keys.
The response contains the remaining account credits in US$ cents:
In the example above, 4936 cents means $49.36 remaining.

Per request

API and MCP responses contain a usage object with details about the consumed tokens per content type:
The fetch and search tools do not return a usage object because it is defined in the OpenAI output schema.

Turning tokens into a cost

Each token type has its own price. Read the prices that apply to your API key from GET https://api.bigdata.com/v1/subscription/quotas: every billing unit reports a units_price, the price of a single token in US$ cents.
The total cost of the call is the sum across all token types.

Try it yourself

api_how_to_monitor_usage

Ready-to-run script that sends a search, reads the live price list from your subscription, and reports the cost of that single call in US dollars.
1

Clone the repository

2

Create a virtual environment and install the dependencies

3

Configure your API key

Create a .env file in that directory:
4

Run the script

Default query, 10 chunks, smart search mode
or a custom query:
Example output:The script prints the cost of the call broken down by token type, followed by the documents the search returned.Cost of a single API call reported per token type by the script
If your usage object returns api_query_units instead of token counts, your subscription is metered per query rather than per content token. The script does not apply to those accounts: see the Legacy API subscriptions tab instead.

Any doubts? Get in touch!

Please get in touch with your Account Manager or support@bigdata.com if you have any questions or would like guidance in selecting the best subscription for your needs.