What a search costs, and what is free

Searching spends credits because every search is a live lookup that we pay for. What follows is exactly what costs what, and the three things you can do for nothing.

The price is always on the button. The Search button shows the price before you press it, for example "Search - up to 5 credits": a page of up to 50 people costs at most 5 credits, charged at 0.1 per person shown, and that figure is worked out by the same rule that does the charging, not estimated separately. The confirmation says the same, "5 credits at most (0.1 per person shown)", and when your balance covers less than a full page it tells you how many people the page will hold. If the page is already in your recent results the button reads "Free - already opened" and no confirmation appears, because there is nothing to confirm; the button checks this again after every search, so a page you have just opened shows as free straight away. When the free count says no one matches your filters, Search is turned off until you change a filter, because the page would come back empty.

Prev and Next move through the results in order: Next stays available for as long as the search has more people to show, and paging stops at 500 pages, which no normal session reaches. Each new page is priced like the first, at up to 5 credits, and a page you fetched in the last 7 days is free.

Free thing 1: re-opening a page you already bought. Any page you fetched in the last 7 days is served again for nothing, and never re-queries the source. Paging back and forth through results you have already paid for is free.

Free thing 2: the match count. Every time you change a filter, a free count shows how many people match before you spend a credit, even with only a country or a city picked. When results have to be filtered after they are fetched, such as by more than one company size, or the country beside a city, the count is shown as a ceiling ("Up to"). When several seniorities are picked with a function, each seniority is counted on its own and added up, shown as "About": an estimate, since someone who holds two of the titles is counted twice and a search can find a few more or fewer. A count we already have is remembered for 24 hours and shown with its age ("4,183,665 people matched 6 hours ago (remembered, not live)"), because a count is a snapshot of an index that keeps moving, and we will not pass an old number off as a current one.

Free thing 3: checking your filters. If a filter combination cannot run, you are told in plain words before anything is charged, so you can fix it at no cost. If the count itself cannot load, your search still works exactly as normal.

What each case costs, end to end. First search of a new filter set: one page, at the price shown on the button. The exact same search again within 7 days: nothing, and the count comes back free with its age. A refined filter set (you added a seniority, or changed a title): a new filter set, so one page again. Coming back to a filter set you ran earlier the same week: free for the pages you already fetched, and the count is free either way. Changing only the ORDER of your job titles, or their capitalisation, is not a new search and does not cost anything extra.