Free webpage or API: choose the right way to resolve a link

Use the webpage when a person is making the choices

If you occasionally want to inspect a public work, paste a supported link into Clifzo and review the result. The public webpage remains free and does not require an API account or display an API credit wallet.

The webpage is a good fit when you will choose a format yourself and do not need to connect the result to another application’s database or queue. There is no need to build task persistence and key management just to inspect a few links.

Use the API when the result belongs in your product

A server integration can attach parsing to your application’s own records, task queue and user permissions. API keys identify a third-party account, while account-level limits and credit records make its usage visible to the customer and administrator.

The API does not replace your application’s workflow design. Decide which fields you need, how often to query a pending task and what the user should see when a source is unavailable. Keep keys on the server and give separate integrations named keys so they can be revoked independently.

How the task price becomes a credit transaction

One successfully parsed work costs 1 credit. One successfully parsed profile page costs 2 credits. Creating a task reserves its price from the account’s available credits; a successful paid result consumes the reservation, while failure, cancellation, expiration or an empty paid result releases it.

Balance queries, ledger queries, status checks and rereading an existing result do not cost credits, but they still use the account’s request-rate allowance. A sufficiently funded account can still reach its concurrent-task limit.

• Available credits can be used for a new task.
• Frozen credits are reserved by tasks that have not yet settled.
• A repeated check of the same completed task does not bill it again.

A profile is not one unlimited request

A profile may contain many works, so the API returns a page rather than silently traversing the entire account. If the result includes collection.next_page_url, your application can submit that URL as a new task when another page is needed.

Each successfully returned profile page costs 2 credits. Display that decision before requesting another page, and stop when the user has enough content or the source provides no continuation. The works listed on a page are not also charged one by one; requesting a listed work as a new detailed parse is a separate 1-credit task.

Distinguish a retry from a new task

A network timeout describes what your client observed. It does not prove that the server rejected the task. Persist the Idempotency-Key and original request body, and reuse them when recovering the same submission. This lets the server return or resume the existing task without reserving its price again.

A deliberate new parse needs a new key, including when the old result has expired and you want fresh source information. Do not use a new key merely to make a pending task appear to complete faster. Start with the API documentation and test one known source before making that behavior part of your product.