Your agent reports 'Export needs credits'

What the agent hit, and how to let it continue without babysitting.

When an agent asks for an export it cannot pay for, the call fails with 402 and a short message:

Export needs credits.

The agent did not do anything wrong and nothing partial was created. The credit check runs before the job exists.

Unblocking it in one minute

  1. Open Home and top up: 500, 1,000 or 3,000 credits.
  2. Tell the agent to retry. The filters it had are still in its context, so it resumes rather than restarting.

Preventing the interruption

Give the agent a spending shape in its instructions rather than hoping:

  • 'Check the account endpoint before any export and report the balance.'
  • 'If the balance is below the row count, ask me before proceeding.'
  • 'Never export more than 2,000 rows without confirming.'

An agent that reads the balance first turns a mid-run failure into a sentence at the start: 'this export needs 1,200 credits and you have 400, top up or shall I narrow it?'

What it can still do without credits

Counts, previews and list management stay free and unlimited. An agent with an empty wallet is still fully useful for sizing markets and refining targeting, which is usually the part that needs the conversation anyway.

Screenshot: An agent chat showing the payment-required response with the top-up link

From the CLI the same condition exits with code 5, so a pipeline can pause and notify rather than failing silently.

Still stuck? support@argorant.com