Why AstroAsk prices by request, not by suite

Most astrology APIs sell you a menu. Pay for the "Vedic suite," pay again for "Western," pay a third time if you also want compatibility scoring or chart images — and often a different credit weight per endpoint on top of that, so your bill depends as much on which calls you happen to make as on how many.

We do it differently: one product, every endpoint, priced only by how many requests you make.

No suites, no credit math

Every AstroAsk plan — Pocket, Orbit, or Cosmos — includes the entire catalog on day one: Vedic astrology (planets, houses, nakshatra, dasha, doshas, panchanga, muhurta), Western astrology (natal, synastry, transits, progressions), compatibility scoring, and chart rendering (North Indian and Western wheel, as SVG or PNG). There is no upsell path from "basic" to "full" — you get the full thing, and the only question is volume.

That's a deliberate constraint on how billing works, not just a marketing line: every call to an endpoint under /api/v1 counts as exactly one request against your monthly quota, regardless of which endpoint you called or how large the response was. A /moon-sign call and a full /western natal call cost the same one request. Batch calls count each item in the batch separately, but nothing is weighted, tiered, or re-priced per endpoint. If you've ever had to model out which combination of credits and add-ons is cheapest for your traffic shape before you can even estimate a bill, you know why we didn't want to build that.

The catalog is granular for the same reason. Each endpoint computes exactly one thing — /planets, /dasha/current, /dosha/manglik — so "one call, one request" describes real usage rather than an averaged-out fiction, and you never pay for calculations you didn't ask for. When you do want a complete birth chart, /batch bundles up to 50 calls into a single HTTP request; each item still costs its one request, so the convenience never changes the price. Endpoint weighting is exactly how credit math creeps into an API, and granularity is how we keep it out.

The three tiers are about volume, not features

Pocket is sized for a side project finding its first users. Orbit is sized for a production app with a growing daily audience. Cosmos is sized for a platform serving astrology at real scale. None of them unlock anything the others don't — they're the same product at three different volumes, plus a 14-day (or 5,000-request) free trial with no credit card required, so you can build against the real catalog before you decide which tier you need.

Sell math, not meaning

There's a second decision behind the pricing model, and it's really the same idea from a different angle: AstroAsk is a calculation API, not a content API. Every response is structured, full-precision data computed on Swiss Ephemeris — real JSON numbers like 331.43152605600557, not rounded and not wrapped in prose. Localized names come back in 21 languages, but the underlying fields — degrees, scores, chart geometry — are always numbers and identifiers you can compute on, sort, threshold, and feed into your own UI or logic.

We think that's the right layer for an API to live at. If what you need is a written reading — the meaning behind a chart, not just its coordinates — that's a product decision for whatever you're building on top of us, not something we bake into the response and charge extra for. So the API stays focused on returning the math precisely and consistently across every endpoint, and pricing stays focused on the one variable that actually reflects how much you're using it: request volume.

If that model fits what you're building, the pricing page has the exact numbers, and the trial gets you a working key in about a minute.