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NameGrid uses a prepaid credit system to keep billing simple and predictable. Instead of managing invoices or payment methods per transaction, you maintain a credit balance in your workspace and spend from it as you register and renew domains. Every operation that costs money tells you exactly how many credits were charged.

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What are credits?

Credits are the currency of the NameGrid platform. The conversion is straightforward: 1 credit = $1 USD.
  • Registration — spending credits registers a new domain under your workspace.
  • Renewal — spending credits extends your domain’s expiry date.
  • Atomic deduction — credits are debited in a single atomic operation. If your balance is too low, the entire request fails immediately and no credits are deducted. Credits are never partially reserved or oversold.
Because debits are atomic, you will never end up with a partially registered domain and a negative balance. Either the full cost is available and the operation proceeds, or it isn’t and nothing changes.

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Checking your balance

Call GET /v1/account at any time to see your current credit balance.
The credits object in the response reflects your real-time balance:
Build balance checks into your workflows before bulk operations to avoid hitting the insufficient-credits error mid-run.

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When credits are charged

Credits are charged at two points in the domain lifecycle: Domain registration — credits are debited when you call POST /v1/domains. The response includes a creditsCharged field so you know exactly what was spent:
Domain renewal — credits are debited when you call POST /v1/domains/{domain}/renew. The same creditsCharged field appears in the renewal response. If your balance is insufficient at the time of either request, the API returns a 402 Payment Required error with details about the shortfall:
Registration and renewal fail immediately with a 402 error if your credit balance is too low — no partial operations occur. Top up your balance in the dashboard before kicking off registrations or bulk renewals to avoid interruptions.
The required field in the 402 response tells you exactly how many credits you need. Use it to calculate the top-up amount before retrying.

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Topping up credits

Purchase additional credits through the NameGrid dashboard at https://app.namegrid.org. Credits are added to your workspace balance instantly after payment and are available for use immediately.