Shodan Credits Explained

At Shodan, the amount of access you get to data and other features of the infrastructure depend on how many credits your account has available. There are 2 types of credits available at Shodan:

1. Query credits
2. Scan credits

Note: Export credits are deprecated and can nolonger be purchased.

Query Credits

Query credits are used to download data via the website, command-line interface or the API. If you're using the CLI or API then query credits are deducted if one of the following 2 conditions is met:

1. A search filter is used
2. Page 2 or beyond is requested

Query credits renew at the start of the month and provide the following amount of data:

1 query credit lets you download 100 results

Here are a few search queries and how many query credits they consume:

• apache: search query without any filters and 1st page of results - no query credits used
• product:mongodb: searches for MongoDB database servers and uses 1 query credit
• 3rd page of apache: requesting the 3rd page costs 1 query credit
• 5th page of product:mongodb: requesting the 5th page of search results for MongoDB: 1 query credit

Scan Credits

The Shodan API lets you request network scans and the number of IPs that you're able to scan is determined by the number of scan credits available on your API plan. They renew at the start of the month and are consumed at the rate of:

1 scan credit lets you scan 1 IP

To learn more about scanning via Shodan check our On-Demand Scanning introduction.