How usage pricing works

Every action your users take in your marketplace requires a call to Sharetribe's API: searching for listings, making purchases or bookings, sending messages, publishing listings, adding reviews, and so on. Updating your marketplace setup and querying your data in Console also require API calls.

Usage applies across all your environments: Test, Dev, and Live. There's no distinction between building and running your marketplace.

All of these generate costs on Sharetribe's hosted infrastructure. These operations consume usage credits.

Each plan (Build, Live, and Hold) includes 1 million usage credits per month at no extra cost.

Additional usage above 1 million credits is charged separately for each month. If your usage doesn’t exceed the included credits, you don't pay anything beyond your plan fee.

Not all usage is equal: some operations use more resources than others. The amount of credits different actions consume is aligned with their costs to Sharetribe. A simple way to describe our usage-based pricing is that it's roughly our infrastructure costs with a small margin on top.

Here are some examples of the costs of different API calls:

You can find a full list of API endpoint types and credits costs in our technical documentation.

We automatically apply tiered volume discounts to usage. If you go above your plan's included credits, you’re charged a fee per additional credit automatic, tiered volume discounts. The more usage you have, the less you pay per credit. Usage credits are priced per 1000 credits, since a single credit's price is extremely small. However, you're charged for the exact number of credits used, rounding to the closest cent.

You can check your usage in Console. There, you’ll see how many credits you’ve used, which tier you are on currently, how much you’ll pay, and see past month’s credit usage.

Each tier applies only to the credits within that range: the first 2 million additional credits are billed at the first tier's rate, the next 3 million at the second tier's rate, and so on.

For example, if you use 7 million credits in a given month, the price breaks down as follows:

Total usage price: $330

If you expect to have at close to this level of usage every month, you should consider a credit commitment. With the smallest credit commitment, 10M credits/month: $249/month, you would pay less and could see 3M credits more of usage before any additional costs.

You can secure a lower price per 1,000 credits when you commit to buying a minimum amount of credits per month for a year.

The three different credit commitment options are:

You don't pay for the full year up front: payments are monthly even though the commitment is for 12 months. When a credit commitment ends after 12 months, you can continue with regular, volume-based pricing or choose to commit to another year.

Any additional usage above the committed credits is charged according to usage tiers with volume discounts.

You can upgrade your commitment at any point. An upgrade restarts the 12-month commitment period.

Learn more about credit commitments

If your transaction process is simple, your users don’t engage in long conversations, don't upload a ton photos, and you don’t have frequent background operations that update your data, you can likely serve a large customer base with lower usage fees. In other words, your costs depend heavily on your users' actions, what your marketplace is for, and the choices made if you've customized your marketplace with code.

It’s still possible to estimate costs by comparing your platform with similar marketplaces. In the table below, you can see examples of real Sharetribe marketplaces at varying scales and usage costs. The examples assume that the customer has subscribed to the optimal credit commitment.

You can estimate your usage fees with the usage simulator on your subscription page. Consider your current credit usage and multiply it by how much you expect your usage to grow. You can add that number to the simulator to estimate how much you might pay in the future.

No. Trial usage is free, and any usage you generate during the free trial isn't charged. In your usage table, you can see trial usage as its own tier, Free, in the month your free trial took place (if you created your account after June 2026).