Two ways to work with us.
Both start free.

The credit, the dollar, and the curve.

The four ways a command is priced.

Every CLI endpoint falls into one of four models. The full per-command breakdown is in the table further down — this is the shape of it.

The volume curve.

List endpoints (tl db pg|es|fb, tl sponsorships, tl uploads, tl snapshots, tl reports, tl comments, tl brands) bill on a curve. The exponent is greater than 1, so cost grows faster than the row count — a 500-row pull costs far more than 50× a 10-row one. That's deliberate: it pushes you toward small, targeted queries.

credits = setup  +  multiplier × scale × rowsexp

Defaults: setup = 1 · scale = 0.126 · exp = 1.2. multiplier is a per-resource complexity factor — 1.0 for structured lists, 1.4 for raw database access (see the table below).

Credits per query. At 10,000 credits to the dollar, a 500-row raw query (218.74 credits) costs about 2¢.

Every command. Every multiplier.

Live values come from cli/utils/metering.py:CREDIT_RATES. Run tl describe --json locally to dump the table the running server is using.

Every response includes a usage block with the exact credits charged and your balance after. Aggregation queries against ES bill on min(hits.total, 200) rather than the (zero-row) hit list — to keep aggs from being free. Raw tl db pg queries that touch sensitive tables or columns carry extra charges on top of the curve — see below.

Sensitive data costs more.

Raw Postgres queries (tl db pg) pick up two extra charges when they touch the most valuable data — so a casual metadata pull stays cheap, while bulk-extracting outreach emails or demographics is priced like the asset it is. The query plan is analysed before the query runs.

volume curve:  setup + (base + table_extras) × scale × rowsexp
flat per row:  (Σ column_extras) × rows

For scale: ~50,000 credits — about $5 — is roughly a day's work on non-sensitive data. Notice how the per-row column charge dominates the moment a sensitive column is included — a 500-row pull of outreach emails is ~16k credits, almost entirely the 30 × 500 flat charge. That's intentional: bulk extraction of sensitive columns scales linearly with the rows you take.

Preview the cost before you run it.

Add --pricing to any tl db pg, tl db fb, or tl db es call. The server runs EXPLAIN only — no SELECT — and returns an upper-bound estimate computed at the query's row ceiling. A dry run is a flat 1 credit, no matter how expensive the real query would be.

$ tl db pg "SELECT * FROM thoughtleaders_channel LIMIT 100" --pricing
# EXPLAIN only — no rows read
  multiplier:   4.4   (channel table +3.0)
  per-row:      0
  upper bound:  ~140 credits  at LIMIT 100
✓ dry run · 1 credit

The raw numbers come back with --pricing --json under the pricing_estimate key. Firebolt and Elasticsearch have no per-table or per-column extras, so their estimate is just the volume curve at the row ceiling — LIMIT for Firebolt, size (or the aggregation doc cap) for Elasticsearch. A Firebolt query with no LIMIT reports an unbounded estimate.

A second limit on sensitive pulls.

Credits cap what a single query costs. A separate, optional time-window quota caps how many sensitive rows your organization can pull over a rolling window — independent of how many credits you hold. It applies only to tl db pg queries that read a priced column (outreach email or demographics); anything that touches no expensive column is never counted, and Firebolt and Elasticsearch are never gated.

The window slides: as old calls age out their allowance frees back up, and the response tells you exactly when to retry. It's orthogonal to credits — hitting either limit stops you, independently of the other. In practice ~96% of expensive queries return 100 rows or fewer, so a typical cap only bites on bulk extraction. A --pricing dry run reads zero rows, so it never consumes quota.

Three habits that cut the bill.

Plan gates.

Plans aren't paywalls. They're data-scoping rules that determine which fields you see on your deals and which resources you can query. Nobody is blocked from installing the CLI — the CLI just tells you what your plan unlocks.

FAQ.