Credits and auto top-up

Ticketing sites put a check in front of the pages worth watching. A monitor has to pass that check before it can read anything, and passing it costs money. One credit is one check passed. On Ticketmaster UK the check is a captcha, answered by the Firm solver. On a football club's eticketing.co.uk site it is the check each of your sign-ins passes when it logs in. Credits are the way you pay for either without opening an account with a captcha provider, and the same balance covers both platforms.

What a credit buys

A credit buys one passed check, which gives the monitor a session with the site. That session then reads the event repeatedly — a session is per site, not per read, so one credit covers hundreds of polls until the site retires the session. On a club site the session is a signed-in one, so each sign-in the monitor uses holds a session of its own.

• Spent before the check, refunded when it fails. You pay for answers, not attempts. The refund is automatic and appears in the ledger on the credits page as its own row.
• Nothing else costs credits. Polling, alerting, running, the dashboard: none of them touch the balance.
• Credits do not expire and are not tied to a plan.

What a monitor actually burns

Our estimate for a Ticketmaster UK event at the default three-second interval, from our testing: a cleared session usually lasts about 20 minutes before the site retires it, and each new session costs one solve and takes about seven to twelve seconds. With the occasional refused attempt that has to be tried again, that comes to about 6 credits an hour per event.

So one event watched for a 14-hour day is about 84 credits — roughly 25p at £3 per 1,000 — and a 1,000 credit pack covers about twelve such event-days. It is an estimate, not a guarantee: a busy on-sale can need new sessions more often.

A football club monitor spends differently: every sign-in it uses passes the club's check when it logs in and again when the club expires the session, roughly every twenty minutes, so the hourly figure is about your number of sign-ins × 3 × what one check costs on that club — one credit on most clubs, three on the few whose sign-in passes a second check. Two sign-ins on Fulham is about 6 an hour; two on Arsenal about 18. The new-monitor page quotes the figure for the club you paste, and the football clubs guide has the detail.

Buying credits

Setting up your first monitor, the New monitor page offers the packs at its Credits step, and Stripe sends you back to that step with your link, webhook and proxies still filled in. The step says Waiting for your payment to arrive for the few seconds it takes, then ticks. Any other time:

1. Go to Settings → Credits.
2. Pick a pack. The packs are priced per thousand solves and the bigger ones are cheaper per solve; the page shows the per-1,000 price on each card.
3. Press Buy. Stripe takes the payment on the same card as your subscription.
4. The balance updates as soon as the payment confirms, usually a second or two. Reload the page if it looks stale.

Automatic top-up

Optional, off by default, and worth turning on if you run monitors overnight. It charges your card for one pack when the balance falls below a threshold you choose.

1. On the credits page, set Top up when the balance falls below to a number that covers a few hours — 300 is a sensible start for one or two monitors.
2. Choose which pack to buy each time.
3. Save. That is the whole setup; there is nothing to confirm by email.

The safety rails, so this can never run away with your card:

• At most one attempt every five minutes.
• After two failed payments in a row, auto top-up switches itself off and we email you.
• If your bank asks for authentication (a 3-D Secure prompt we cannot answer off-session), we stop rather than retry, and email you to buy a pack by hand.
• Each attempt carries an idempotency key, so a retried request cannot charge you twice for the same top-up.

What happens at zero

Monitors set to the Firm solver pause. They do not fail quietly and they do not lose anything:

• The status becomes Paused — no credits with a link to top up.
• The slot is kept. Nothing is deleted.
• When credits arrive, the monitor starts again by itself. There is nothing to press.
• Monitors using your own captcha key are unaffected — they were never metered here.

Reading the ledger

Every movement is a row on the credits page, newest first: what it was (purchase, spend, refund, grant), how many credits, the balance afterwards, and a reference. The balance-after column is the audit trail — if two rows disagree with it, something is wrong and we want to hear about it.

Can I use my own key?

It is possible on platforms that accept one, but we don't recommend it at the moment, and neither platform we watch today accepts one: Ticketmaster UK refuses vendor tokens, and the clubs' checks are passed by the Firm service. In our testing CapSolver tokens are almost always refused, and we have not been able to test KagedCap yet, so we can't recommend it either. The Firm solver is what we recommend and what we test against. See captcha keys.

Something here wrong or missing? Tell us, and we will fix the page rather than just answer the message.