Caching
Repeat calls are served from a shared cache for a fraction of the price. What is cached, and for how long.
Manifold keeps each tool's answer for a while, and gives the same answer to the same question until it expires. A cached answer comes back at once. It costs 25% of the live price the first time your workspace gets it, and nothing after that.
#What a cached answer costs
A cache hit costs 25% of what the live call cost, rounded up, with a minimum of 1 credit. Free tools stay free. There is no hold on your balance for a hit.
You pay for an answer once. After your workspace has paid for it, by the live call or by its first cache hit, every repeat of the same question is free until the answer expires. An agent can ask again after a retry or a new plan and not pay 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, and meta.credits_charged is the hit price, or 0 when your workspace already paid for the answer. meta.data_as_of says how old the data is. The rest of meta, the rows and the cursor, are the ones stored with the answer.
#What counts as the same question
The cache key is the tool, the provider and the tool's input after it 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 is part of the key: location, language, device, limit, cursor and each tool's own parameters. A different limit is a different question.
A dry run returns before the cache, so it never reads or fills it. Each provider has its own entries.
#Shared across workspaces
The cache holds public data only (search results, public profiles, ads and posts), so it is shared: if another workspace asked the same question this morning, you get their answer at the cache price, and your repeats are then free. Nothing about who asked is part of an answer.
#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: asking again asks the provider again, at the NoData price of 1 credit.
AI answers are never cached, because the point is what an engine says now. A new-posts window is never cached, because each call asks about a different stretch of time. A technical crawl is never cached either.
#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.