Credits and auto top-up

Ticketing sites put an anti-bot challenge in front of the pages worth watching. A monitor has to answer that challenge before it can read anything, and answering it costs money. One credit is one solve. Credits are the way you pay for that without opening an account with a captcha provider.

What a credit buys

A credit buys one answered challenge, which gives the monitor a cleared session with the site. That session then reads the event repeatedly — a clearance is per site, not per read, so one solve covers hundreds of polls until the site retires the session.

• Spent before the solve, 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

Measured on box2 on 12 September 2026, one Ticketmaster UK event at the default three-second interval: a cleared session lived between 2.6 minutes and 19.4 minutes before the site refused it, and each re-clear cost one solve and about seven seconds. That worked out at roughly three to four credits an hour per event.

So one event running continuously is about 70–100 credits a day, and a 1,000 credit pack is somewhere around ten to fourteen event-days. That is a measurement from one afternoon on one event, not a guarantee: a busy on-sale re-clears more often, and a quiet midweek event less.

Buying credits

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.

When to use your own key instead

If you already buy solves in bulk, your own CapSolver or KagedCap key will be cheaper and you keep that spend on its own invoice. Everything else is the same. See captcha keys. You can mix: the solver is chosen per monitor, not per account.

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