IndexNow Credits Explained: Pricing, ROI, and How Many You Actually Need
How credits map to URL submissions, what each package actually costs per credit, and a simple way to estimate how many you need before you buy.
The basic unit: one credit, one URL
Every package works the same underlying way regardless of size or price: one credit submits one URL through IndexNow. There's no separate fee layered on top for API access, no per-domain charge for running multiple sites under one account, and no expiry date on unused credits — a credit bought today is worth exactly the same thing whether it gets used tomorrow or six months from now. That simplicity is deliberate: the only real decision a buyer has to make is how many URLs they realistically expect to submit over time, not which tier of features they can afford or which plan locks them into a particular usage pattern.
The four packages, and what actually changes between them
Starter is $50 for 1,000 credits — enough for a smaller site's first batch of submissions or an occasional blog that publishes a handful of posts a month. Professional is $150 for 3,500 credits and adds a priority crawl queue plus full API access, aimed at sites that publish or update content regularly enough to want automation. Enterprise is $200 for 5,000 credits with the fastest available turnaround time, sized for a mid-sized catalogue or a busy publisher. Agency is $350 for 10,000 credits and is built specifically for running submissions across multiple client sites from a single account rather than juggling separate billing per client. Credits and price both scale up together across the four tiers, but not at exactly the same rate — which is the whole subject of the next section.
What each credit actually costs
Divide price by credits and the real per-credit cost drops noticeably as the package gets bigger: 5 cents a credit on Starter, roughly 4.3 cents on Professional, 4 cents on Enterprise, and 3.5 cents on Agency. That works out to close to a 30% lower cost per submission on the top tier compared with the entry-level one — so the packages aren't simply "more credits for more money," the marginal cost of each additional submission genuinely goes down as purchase volume goes up, which matters most once a site is submitting regularly as part of its normal publishing rhythm rather than making one-off occasional purchases.
Estimating how many credits you need
Start from your actual publishing rate, not your total site size, since total size mostly matters only for a first cleanup: count how many URLs you create or meaningfully update in a typical month — new products, new articles, price changes, or content edits substantial enough to be worth re-indexing — and multiply that by twelve to estimate a year's worth of ongoing submissions. Add your current backlog of never-submitted URLs on top of that estimate, but only for the first purchase; after the initial cleanup, ongoing submissions should track your normal, steady publishing volume rather than spiking every month the way a first-time catalogue-wide cleanup naturally does. A site publishing 40 new or meaningfully updated URLs a month, for example, needs roughly 480 credits a year for steady-state submissions alone — comfortably inside a single Starter purchase once the initial backlog is cleared separately, which is a useful sanity check before committing to a larger package on a hunch.
The free report that removes the guesswork
Rather than estimating blind from general assumptions about site size, a free indexability scan shows the actual number of URLs currently unindexable on your site today and the specific technical reason behind each one — a broken link, a stray noindex tag, a canonical conflict pointing at the wrong page, or simply a URL that was never submitted to begin with. That number becomes the real, concrete starting backlog to size a first purchase against, and because the scan itself is free to run before spending anything, the package decision ends up based on an actual measured count rather than a rough guess that might be badly off in either direction.
The refund case that protects the purchase
Any submission still stuck pending after 7 days refunds its credit automatically, with no support ticket required and no manual review needed on either side. In practice, this means a purchase can't quietly waste credits on submissions that a search engine never actually gets around to queuing for whatever reason on its end — either a URL gets accepted and crawled within the normal window, or the credit comes straight back to the account balance on its own, ready to be spent on the next URL instead. That guarantee runs as a scheduled job on IndexLaunch's own backend rather than being a manual promise a support team has to remember and honor by hand.
When to size up a tier instead of buying more of the same
Repeatedly running out of Starter credits within the same month is the clearest possible signal to size up a tier rather than just repurchasing the same package again — Professional's priority crawl queue and meaningfully lower per-credit cost make more practical sense than restocking the entry tier every few weeks and paying the higher per-submission rate every single time. Similarly, a catalogue crossing roughly a thousand products, or an agency starting to manage more than one client site at once, tends to outgrow Professional's API access ceiling fairly quickly and is better served long-term by Enterprise or Agency, where both the turnaround speed and the underlying per-credit economics keep improving at each step up. The signal to watch isn't the calendar, it's the pattern: a one-off spike from a single large migration is still a Starter or Professional problem solved with one bigger purchase, while a recurring monthly shortfall is a sign the account has genuinely outgrown its current tier and should move up rather than keep topping off.
Putting the numbers together
A useful way to think about the whole system: credits are a metered utility for getting found by search engines, not a subscription bundled around a fixed feature set you either qualify for or don't. The right package is whichever one matches your actual monthly submission volume at the lowest realistic per-credit cost for that volume — and because unused credits never expire or decay in value, there's genuinely little downside to buying slightly ahead of a growth curve you can already see coming, whether that's a planned catalogue expansion, a content calendar that's about to pick up pace, or simply onboarding a new client whose site needs the same treatment as the ones already on the account.