Caching
Repeat calls are served from a shared cache for a fraction of the price. What is cached, and for how long.
When someone asks Manifold a question, it keeps the answer for a while. Until the answer expires, anyone who asks the same question gets it back at once, for less. The first time your workspace gets a cached answer it costs 25% of the live price, and after that it is free.
What a cached answer costs
A cache hit costs 25% of what the live call costs, rounded up, with a minimum of 1 credit. Free tools stay free, and a hit puts no hold on your balance.
You pay for an answer once. After your workspace has paid for it, either with the live call or with its first cache hit, every repeat of the same question is free until the answer expires. This means your agent can ask again after a retry or a change of plan without paying twice. When the answer expires and is fetched again, the new answer is a new purchase.
| Live call | Cache hit |
|---|---|
| 1 credit | 1 credit |
| 5 credits | 2 credits |
| 10 credits | 3 credits |
| 50 credits | 13 credits |
| 100 credits | 25 credits |
How to tell
A cached result has meta.cached: true. Its meta.credits_charged is the hit price, or 0 when your workspace already paid for the answer. meta.data_as_of tells you how old the data is. The rows and the cursor are the ones stored with the answer.
What counts as the same question
Two calls are the same question when they call the same tool with the same input, after the input is normalised. Normalising removes differences that do not change the answer, such as letter case or spaces at the ends of a keyword. Everything that does change the answer counts: location, language, device, limit, cursor and each tool's own parameters. So a different limit is a different question.
A dry run returns before the cache, so it never reads or fills it.
Shared across workspaces
The cache holds public data only, such as search results, public profiles, ads and posts, so it is shared between workspaces. If another workspace asked the same question this morning, you get their answer at the cache price, and your repeats are then free. An answer never says anything about who asked.
How long answers are kept
Each kind of data is kept about as long as it stays true. Rankings move daily, a transcript never changes, and an email address changes rarely.
An empty answer (NoData) is never cached, so asking again asks the provider again, and a NoData answer costs nothing.
Some answers are never cached because the point is to get them fresh. AI answers show what an engine says now. A new-posts window asks about a different stretch of time on each call. A technical crawl checks the site as it is today.
Getting fresh data
There is no parameter to skip the cache. If an answer is too old for your question, check meta.data_as_of and ask again once the entry has expired. A small change to the question, such as a different limit, is also a different entry.