How Billing Units Work

How CarsXE counts billable usage — per call vs per result — and what that means for your bill.

Most CarsXE APIs bill per successful call. A few bill per returned result or per item in the request. This page covers the result-based exceptions and points bulk VIN jobs to their own docs.

Default: per successful call

A typical successful call (success: true) is billed as one call. Failed or empty lookups (success: false, 404 no_data, validation 400) are free.

This is not true of every endpoint:

Per result — Ownership (below) and YMM Options bulk variants (below).
Per VIN in the request — Recalls Batch and VINs Batch. See those product docs; a 500-VIN submit is 500 units, not 1.

Ownership — per returned record

All five Ownership lookups (VIN, Person, Address, Phone, ZIP) bill per record returned, not per request.

Zero records → 404 no_data → free.
N records in the response (owners / matches / records) → N billable units.

Example: a VIN lookup that returns 3 owners bills 3 units. A ZIP page with 40 records bills 40.

See Ownership docs for details on each lookup type.

YMM Options — bulk variants bill per model

Most YMM Options requests are billed per successful call, like any other API.

The exception is the bulk variant list: dimension=variants with year + make and no model. That request bills per distinct model in the response. modelCount is the billed quantity, with a minimum of 1 even when modelCount is 0.

Example: 82 variant strings across 12 models → modelCount: 12 → 12 billable units.

See YMM Options docs for full parameter reference.