What happens to credits you did not use
On Starter they expire. On Growth, Scale and Enterprise they roll over for one, three and twelve months. How rolled-over credits are spent, and the rule people mistake this for.
Every plan issues a fresh allowance on your billing date. What happens to the part of last month's allowance you did not spend depends on your tier:
| Plan | Unused credits roll over for |
|---|---|
| Starter | Not at all — they expire on your billing date |
| Growth | 1 month |
| Scale | 3 months |
| Enterprise | 12 months |
A rolled-over credit is an ordinary credit with an expiry date attached. On Growth, credits issued in January are still spendable through February and are gone when March's allowance arrives.
Fresh credits are spent first
This is the part worth understanding, because it decides how much of a rollover you actually keep:
An export draws on the current month's allowance first, and only reaches into rolled-over credits once that is exhausted.
It works in your favour. Spending the newest credits first means the oldest ones keep their full remaining life rather than being burned while they still had a month to run. On a Scale plan with three months of rollover, a quiet quarter followed by a heavy one is a shape the allowance genuinely absorbs.
Rollover is a buffer, not a bank
It smooths a lumpy month. It is not a way to accumulate a year of a large plan and spend it in a week — the window is one, three or twelve months and each batch expires on its own clock. If your work is strongly seasonal, it is still cheaper to move up for the busy months; upgrades are prorated to the day.
Where to see it
The dashboard shows your balance split into this month's allowance and anything carried in, each with the date it expires. The API returns the same breakdown on the credits endpoint — authenticating with an API key.
The thing this is often confused with
The rolling 30-day deduplication window is a different mechanism, and it is the one that genuinely saves you money. A business you export is not billed again if you export it again within 30 days — across different searches, different files, different people on the account. That window moves with each business independently and has nothing to do with your billing date.
Two clocks, and they are not the same clock
Your billing date issues a fresh allowance and ages anything carried over. Each business's own 30-day window decides whether exporting it costs anything at all. A business exported on the 28th is still free to re-export on the 5th of the next month, even though the allowance reset in between — how lead credits work.
When you change plan or cancel
- Upgrade. The larger allowance replaces the smaller one immediately for the rest of the period, and the longer rollover window applies to credits issued from then on.
- Downgrade. The smaller allowance and the shorter rollover window both start at the next renewal. Credits already carried over keep the expiry they were issued with; a downgrade does not shorten them retrospectively.
- Cancel. Credits do not survive the end of the subscription, rolled-over ones included. Files you already exported do — what you keep after cancelling.
Annual plans
An annual plan issues credits monthly, not as one pot of twelve, and each month's allowance rolls over on the same terms as its tier. This is what stops an annual plan being burned through in week one and then being useless for eleven months — more on annual billing.
Seeing what you have left
Top right of the dashboard, with the reset date next to it. You will also get a warning in the app at 80% and again at 100% of the allowance, so running out should never be something you discover from a failed export.
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