Each ImportFromWeb plan comes with a certain number of credits per month, used for scraping data from websites. Depending on the website you scrape, from one to several credits are counted each time ImportFromWeb loads a page.
Basic Rule: By default, 1 credit is used for 1 successful request (fetching 1 URL)
For Premium Websites: Due to their complex data access, these sites require 2 to 10 credits per URL:
| Premium Websites | Credits counted for 1 request (1 URL) |
|---|---|
| Amazon | 2 credits |
| Noon | 2 credits |
| Walmart | 2 credits |
| Google Search | 5 credits |
| Google Maps | 10 credits |
| YouTube | 5 credits |
| 5 credits |
For example, let’s assume you want to extract the price from a product listing on Amazon, with the following formula:
=IMPORTFROMWEB("https://www.amazon.com/dp/XXXX","sale_price").ImportFromWeb will request the page and 2 credits will be counted.
Data Points and Selectors
The number of data points collected or selectors used does not affect the credit count. You can collect numerous data points from a single URL without additional credit costs.
For example, those 2 formulas count as 1 single credit:
=IMPORTFROMWEB("url","selector 1")=IMPORTFROMWEB("url", "selector 1, selector 2, selector 3, selector 4, selector 5")
Key Points to Note
1. Data Updates: you can decide to execute ImportFromWeb at any time so you work with the most updated data. When data is updated, new credits are counted.
You may have noticed that Google Sheets sometimes natively reload the =IMPORTFROMWEB() formulas; to avoid that IMPORTFROMWEB fetches the data source constantly, pages content is kept in cache for 1 week by default and up to 4 weeks (you can set this up).
2. Failed Requests: If fetching page content fails or no elements on the page match the selectors, no credits are deducted.
3. Credit Expiry: Unused credits cannot be carried over from one month/year to another.