Legacy Credits

In early 2025, we introduced a new, more flexible way of counting and charging credits. It allows us to adjust credit consumption based on the length of individual computations, which means that we could remove stringent computation time restrictions that often lead to failed computations and frustration for our users.
If you subscribed to your plan in 2025 or later, the new method almost certainly applies to you. If you are unsure, check your billing dashboard.

This article describes the pre-2025 credit counting methodology.

ShapeDiver provides an infrastructure service for anyone working with Grasshopper, from individual computational designers to large organizations. As such, it's important to us to provide you with a fair and transparent pricing system that scales with your usage and needs.

We use a combination of subscription plans and usage-based credits to achieve this. Each plan unlocks

• a certain set of features,

• a number of seats,

• a number of credits that can be used within each calendar month

This guide will first introduce our credit system and how you can manage your usage and cost, and then provide detailed insights into the different actions that consume your account's credits.

Overview of Credits and Credit Accounts

When you or others work with your ShapeDiver account, credits are consumed for actions like computing the solution of a Grasshopper model for a set of parameters, generating a file export, or downloading an AR scene.

You can review and manage your credit consumption on the billing page in your dashboard on the ShapeDiver platform. This page includes information about the credits available to you and how many have already been used. 

Prepaid Credits

Every ShapeDiver plan includes a number of credits that are available for consumption within a given calendar month. If you are researching which plan to purchase, you can find this number in the description of the different plans on our pricing page. If you are already a user, you can find the number of prepaid credits available to you on your billing page.
The available credits are reset at the beginning of every month, and unused credits are not carried over to subsequent months. 

Excess Credits

If your prepaid credits are used up before the end of a given month, you can continue using your account by allowing us to charge you for any credits in excess of the amount included in your plan. These credits are called excess credits, and we'll send you an invoice for the amount you have used at the end of each month.

To avoid costly surprises, you can limit the amount of excess monthly credits your account consumes. You can set this limit on your billing page to

• zero (no excess credits) 

• any positive number, or

• unlimited.

Account Blocking

Once your account reaches the limit of available credits and no further credits can be consumed in the current month, we will pause access to your parametric models until new credits become available.

This can happen

• when you have used up your prepaid credits and have set your excess credit limit to zero or

• when you have reached the excess credit limit you configured.

When you have run out of credits, you will not be able to access your models, but you will retain access to your account. You can perform various management tasks like downloading your Grasshopper models, deleting models, or managing account settings. But you won't be able to view or compute any solutions for your models on the platform, in any embedded solution, or through our APIs.

To reactivate all of your models, you can choose to

• increase your excess credit limit on your billing page

• upgrade to a plan with a higher number of prepaid credits or

• wait for the end of the current calendar month.

If you are a member of an organization's account on ShapeDiver, only the organization's owners or administrators can make these changes.

Credit Usage Notifications

We know that many of our customers run critical applications based on our services, and we will always strive to help you avoid negative surprises regarding finances or availability.

To do so, we will send you email and in-platform notifications when your credit use reaches certain thresholds in any given month.

These include at the moment:

• Notifications when 50%, 90% and 100% of your prepaid credits have been used up. These include detailed information on what happens if your prepaid credits run out.

• Notifications when 50%, 90% and 100% of your excess credits have been used up, should you have configured a limit.

Consuming Credits

Counting Modes

We designed the consumption of credits on our platform to scale with resource usage as well as possible. To adjust to our customers' diverse usage patterns, we've created three basic modes:

Browser Mode, Platform Mode and General Mode

All three will be explained in detail later, but let's start with the motivation and fundamentals for each of them:

Browser Mode is primarily designed for end-user applications running in a browser, though it can also be used in other situations. Its goal is to allow customers to release public-facing applications without the concern of unexpected costs caused by malicious actors or bots.

In Browser Mode, credits are mainly charged for 10-minute intervals during which a user interacts with a model. Short computations within this period are not charged individually unless they produce file exports. Usage in Browser Mode is rate-limited in a way that ensures a seamless experience for human users while discouraging batch computing or similar tasks that require numerous Output Requests in rapid succession.

Platform Mode is used for all interactions with your models that happen within the ShapeDiver platform at shapediver.com/app. The experience in this mode is similar to Browser Mode, but we won’t charge you any credits for 10-minute sessions.

General Mode is designed to provide maximum flexibility and performance for applications of any kind. In General Mode, we charge credits for every request sent to our servers. The amount of credits charged for a request depends mainly on the time our servers require to compute the result. In this mode, our servers will aim to answer all requests as quickly as possible without applying rate limiting, except to safeguard the stability and performance of our systems.

Terminology

Credit charges are triggered by various actions on our servers. Some are treated differently depending on the modes we just covered in the previous section. Before we look at the individual modes in detail, here's a list of actions that can trigger credit charges:

• Output Requests: This type of request asks our servers to return the outputs of a ShapeDiver model for a specific set of parameters. Outputs are typically either geometry or materials used to display geometric objects in a viewer and attributes and meta-data of a limited size. Output Requests will be answered from our cache if the particular result has already been computed before, and they will trigger a computation on our geometry workers if this is not the case.

• Export Requests: These requests call for the return of a specific export defined in a ShapeDiver model. Exports can be everything from CAD files to images, PDFs, or binary data. As for Output Requests, a computation will be triggered if the requested content is not available in our cache.

• Combined Requests: In some situations, requesting outputs and exports for a set of parameters is more efficient through a single call. A Combined Request is an Output Request that also identifies one or several exports that should be computed and returned.

• Computations: Whenever data unavailable in our cache is requested, the necessary parameters are dispatched to one of our geometry workers to compute it. This worker will then run this computation and store all requested data in our cache. Once this is done, we answer the request as quickly as possible. The amount of time our workers require to complete this task is called computation time. It includes the time used by Grasshopper’s solver and the time to read the results from Grasshopper and serialize them into files.

• Opening a session using an "Embedding Ticket": This is done with a specific request to our API, which creates a session with a unique ID. Sessions have a lifetime of a maximum of one hour but can be closed earlier on request. When you use our ShapeDiver Viewer on its own, as part of App Builder, or one of our SDKs, these API requests are handled for you.

• Sessions are charged in 10-minute chunks. Opening a new session always starts one 10-minute chunk. If the session continues after the first chunk, our servers look for additional requests coming in. Once the first request outside the initial 10-minute chunk comes in, another chunk is started. This means that a browser tab that remains idle for hours because a user did not close it will not create additional credit charges until the user engages with it again.

• AR Requests: The ShapeDiver platform and APIs allow you to download the 3D outputs of a ShapeDiver model as an asset for use in the native AR viewers of various mobile devices.

Credit Counting

Examples

Let’s look at some realistic examples of using the ShapeDiver infrastructure.

Case 1: A user opens a website with an embedded ShapeDiver viewer

Case 2: Batch Computing