Watch the credits that run your machine
- a site's indexing silently dead for days on a $0 balance; 7 provider balances now on the health page with a 6-hourly check and low-balance alerts
What you're doing and why
Your machine runs on a handful of paid services: the one that writes your pages, the one that pulls search data, the one that submits pages for indexing, the one that gives each site a phone number. They all run on prepaid credit, and when one hits zero it doesn't shout — the work just quietly stops. This lesson is about making that impossible to miss.
The exact steps
- Open the health page in your dashboard. Every service you depend on is listed with its current balance and when it was last checked.
- Set the floors. Each service alerts when it drops below its threshold. You want the alert to arrive with days of runway, not on empty.
- Act on the alert. It arrives in the notification bell and by email, once a day at most, so it isn't noise you learn to ignore.
- Check it after any big run. Building a site or generating images draws down several balances at once.
- Know which ones can't be read automatically. A couple of services don't publish a balance, so they show as "manual" — you check those in their own dashboard when a run fails oddly.
What it looked like for us
The reason this exists: one of our sites sat unindexed for days because the indexing service's balance was empty. Nothing errored loudly, nothing showed on a dashboard. The build had finished, the pages were live, and they simply were never submitted. We only found it by going looking during an unrelated audit — and by then we'd lost days of the ranking clock on a site that was otherwise finished.
What the health page reads now, live:
| Service | What it does | Balance when we built this |
|---|---|---|
| Bright Data | company research for pitching | $37.13 |
| DataForSEO | rankings + market research | $13.89 |
| Kimi / Moonshot | writes the site content | $9.19 |
| OpenRouter | images, logos, quality checks | $6.32 |
| Vonage | the tracked phone numbers | €2.66 |
| Indexing service | submits pages to Google | manual check |
| Business data | prospect enrichment | manual check |
Checked every 6 hours. The first reading told us something useful immediately: the phone service was the closest to its floor, and it's the one that every lead call and text runs through.
Gotchas
- The dangerous one is the service with no balance API. Those can't alert you, so they're the ones that will bite. Our indexing outage was exactly that. Check them by hand after any failed or suspiciously quick run.
- A subscription and its API credit are different wallets. Paying monthly for a chat plan does not top up the API balance the machine actually spends. We track the API one.
- Top up before a batch, not during. A run that dies halfway leaves a site half-built and you pay for the work twice.
- Watch the phone credit hardest. Everything else failing costs you time. The phone failing costs you a lead that a renter is paying for — which is trust, not just money.