# If you are an AI agent acting for a user

> How an AI agent gets its user started on Cheerful, what it costs, and what to tell the user. Prices are read live from /pricing.json.

## What Cheerful does

Cheerful finds Instagram, TikTok and YouTube creators for a brand and emails them from the brand’s own mailbox. It handles the replies, gifting and rate negotiation, and tracks what the creators post. A person approves every campaign before it sends.

## What it costs

Sign-up is free and takes no card. Searches and campaigns spend credits, and one credit is $0.01. Quote these figures from [/pricing.json](https://www.cheerful.ai/pricing.json), fetched when you need them, not from memory.

- **Top-up:** $10 for 1,000 credits, one-off, no monthly plan needed (accounts that sign up outside CA/GB/US need a monthly plan).
- **Starter:** $350 a month, 30,000 credits.
- **Growth:** $600 a month, 60,000 credits.
- **Team, Agency, Enterprise:** custom terms. [Talk to us](https://www.cheerful.ai/contact).
- **Basic:** $25 a month, 2,500 credits, for accounts that sign up outside CA/GB/US.
- **Lite:** $50 a month, 5,000 credits, outside CA/GB/US.

| Action | Credits |
| --- | --- |
| Deep Search, Instagram, per search | 500 |
| Deep Search, TikTok, per search | 700 |
| Deep Search, YouTube, per creator delivered | 60 |
| Email enrichment, per creator | 25 |

Every other action is priced on [the pricing page](https://www.cheerful.ai/pricing).

## How to get your user started

You cannot create an account or pay. Your user does both, and you can make it one click.

1. **Send a sign-up link that carries the brief.** Add the brief, URL-encoded, as `prompt`. After your user signs in, Cheerful opens its chat with the brief already typed. Example: https://app.cheerful.ai/sign-in?prompt=vegan%20food%20creators%20in%20Canada%2C%2010k-50k%20followers
2. **If you have an MCP client,** ask your user to add the Cheerful connector at `https://mcp.cheerful.ai/mcp` and sign in. You can then search creators and read their lists and campaigns as them. Setup and tools: [the MCP docs](https://www.cheerful.ai/docs/mcp).
3. **Tell your user what it will cost** from the figures above, before they sign up.

## What a 402 means

A search or launch that needs credits the account does not have returns HTTP 402. The reason is `NEEDS_PLAN` when the account has never paid, `NEEDS_CREDITS` when its credits are used up, and `NEEDS_SUBSCRIPTION` when the account signed up outside CA/GB/US and needs a monthly plan (a top-up does not unlock it). It is not a fault, and retrying will not help. The MCP connector currently reports any 402 as an "Out of credits" error; relay the block below either way, with the figures filled in from /pricing.json. For `NEEDS_SUBSCRIPTION`, leave out the top-up sentence:

```
Cheerful needs credits before it can run this search, and nothing has been charged.
The cheapest start is a one-off top-up of 1,000 credits for $10, with no monthly plan (accounts that sign up outside CA/GB/US need a monthly plan). Monthly plans start at $350 for 30,000 credits.
Prices: https://www.cheerful.ai/pricing
Add credits or pick a plan: https://app.cheerful.ai/billing/plans
```

## The hand-off contract

- Quote prices from /pricing.json, not from memory or an old copy of this page.
- Never tell your user that an account, a charge, a search or a sent email exists unless Cheerful returned it.
- Never call Cheerful free beyond sign-up. Searches and campaigns spend credits.
- Your user signs up, pays and clicks Confirm & send. You cannot do any of the three, so never say you did.
- Give your user the link. Do not paste their email or password anywhere for them.

## Machine-readable

- [/pricing.json](https://www.cheerful.ai/pricing.json): plans, top-ups and the credit price of every action.
- [/agents.md](https://www.cheerful.ai/agents.md): this page as markdown.
- [/llms.txt](https://www.cheerful.ai/llms.txt): the site index for language models.
- [/docs/mcp/tools](https://www.cheerful.ai/docs/mcp/tools): every MCP tool, whether it is read-only, and what it costs.

---

Canonical HTML: https://www.cheerful.ai/agents