Most contact-data APIs price by credit: a fixed pool of credits per month, with different operations costing different amounts. It reads well on a pricing page — "100,000 credits for $49" sounds enormous. Whether it's cheap depends entirely on what you're doing with it.
The part that's easy to miss
Credit costs aren't uniform. A basic validation might cost 1 credit; a phone lookup can cost 500. If your workflow leans on the expensive operations, your effective monthly volume is a lot smaller than the headline credit number implies — and you won't know your real cost per workflow until you've mapped every operation you use to its credit price.
What flat-rate changes
Fyonta doesn't meter by operation. You pay $99 or $499 a month, and your ceiling is a request-rate limit (200/min or 1,000/min), not a shrinking balance. The tradeoff is the inverse of credits: you can't burst-spend a whole month's budget in an afternoon, but you also can't run out mid-campaign and get stuck waiting for a renewal date.
When credit-based pricing is actually the better fit
To be fair to the model: if your usage is genuinely light and bursty — a few hundred lookups a month — a small credit pack can be cheaper than any flat-rate plan. Flat-rate pricing is a better trade once your usage is steady enough that you'd rather know your bill in advance than track a balance.
The honest way to compare
Take your actual expected monthly usage, broken down by operation type, and price it against a specific competitor's published credit costs (their pricing page will have a table like this — ours is on the comparison page). Don't compare the biggest number on either homepage; compare your real workflow.