Censys Platform Q&A

Hi Censys support,I tried to reach you with email, but got an email saying we have to buy Gold Support.Our “Commercial Pro” subscription expires on November 1st, but since early this month, API call against the legacy Search API returns “Censys Legacy Search was decommissioned on September 30, 2026.”I check you access on the new platform, seems like we have 0 credits.So we can’t do API call against the new platform API either.Is this expected?Thanks.  

Hi Censys Team,I am writing to request access to the Google Cloud BigQuery integration for our enterprise account.Currently, we ingest the daily IPv4 host dataset by downloading raw JSON files and processing them via AWS Lambda pipelines. We believe this workflow introduces unnecessary complexity and computational overhead. To streamline this process, we intend to shift the workload to BigQuery, allowing us to process the data natively within GCP using standard SQL and transfer only the refined results to our environment.Could you please advise on the next steps to get this provisioned?Specifically, let us know if you require our GCP Project ID or a dedicated Service Account email to grant the necessary read permissions.Looking forward to your response.Best regards,

Our credit term was listed as running from September 9, 2025 through September 8, 2026. Based on that period, I expected the credits to remain available until the end of September 8, 2026.However, the credits expired at 23:59 UTC on September 7, 2026, which appears to be one day earlier than expected.We had planned to use our remaining credits on the final day of the contract term (September 8), but because the credits expired earlier than anticipated, we were unable to complete the work we had scheduled.Could someone clarify whether credit expiration is intended to occur at 23:59 UTC on the day before the contract end date? 

Hello,I would like to confirm whether Censys Free accounts can be used for commercial purposes.Specifically, we are planning to use Censys as part of a paid cybersecurity training course. Each participant would create and use their own Free account through the Censys web interface to search instructor-designated IP addresses and review publicly available host, service, certificate, and related asset information.We will not redistribute or resell Censys data, perform bulk data collection, or use paid-only features.Is this type of use permitted under the Censys Free account terms?Are there any licensing or account restrictions we should be aware of for this type of training use?Thank you.

According to:https://docs.censys.com/docs/censys-credits#censys-credits-for-free-and-starter-users“Every Free and Starter user receives 100 credits per month for free. Unused credits expire at the end of each month. Free accounts provide access to basic protocols and services for search and exploration.” I’ve never received any credits, and have thusly been unable to evaluate the service, is there something wrong with my account or is the documentation incorrect?

I purchased 10,000 Credits, but my balance didn't change after submitting the order, and there was no charge to my credit card. After attempting to purchase two more times, I noticed the Billing had changed to 308 / 30,500 available. What does this mean? Will Censys deduct the remaining amount and top up my balance later? I only intended to top up 10,000 Credits, but because the top-up failed twice, how can I cancel the transaction?

Will a failed credit purchase be automatically retried when my card has sufficient funds?Hi,I purchased 10,000 Censys Credits for $1,900, and the purchase was successful.Later, I tried to purchase another 10,000 Credits for $1,900. However, at that moment, my Visa card did not have enough available credit to complete the payment.After I submitted the second payment: No additional Credits were added to my account. I did not see a successful or failed payment message. My Censys account still shows only the original $1,900 order; there is no second order. My Visa bank app also shows only the original $1,900 transaction. There is no second pending transaction or authorization. However, my Credit Balance changed from 10,000 / 10,000 to 10,000 / 20,000. My question is:Was the second payment attempt automatically cancelled/declined, or is there still a pending payment request on the Censys side?More importantly, if I later restore enough available credit on my Visa card, could Censys

Credit Management says that my credits have run out, but it says that I have only used 22 credits out of the 100 that are provided free of charge per month. It says 0/0 Available.

Hello,One of my collections is capped at 100, is it possible to get that increased for the academic access? I am tracking investment fraud / pig butchering scam sites using a very specific indicator, I know using other tools there are well over 1,500+ sites. With an increase of collection capacity we should be able to identify more sites.  

Only one user is having this issue, where signing on via SSO will give him this error 

Hello, Im unable to buy credit. I fill up the form with all the info, submit it, the page refreshes but nothing else happens.I’ve tried with : different web browsers different credit cards even different OS !!Please help !! I NEED CREDITS!!

I just made an purchase in censys platform for upgrading my account to starter, the transaction has complete and money has been taken from my credit card but i didn't get any notification or upgradeIf anyone know how to contact support give me an alternative.

Hey ​@MattK_Censys, I believe there may be an issue with how Personal Access Tokens (PATs) are associated with Organization accounts.Environment I have been granted 60,000 credits through an Organization plan. I can successfully switch between my Free workspace and the Organization workspace in the Censys web UI. IssueWhen I create a Personal Access Token (PAT) while using the Organization workspace, the token appears to be associated with my Free account instead of the Organization account.As a result: API requests appear to use the Free-tier credit allocation (100 credits). Organization-level credits (60,000 credits) are not available through the PAT. Features that require Organization-level access cannot be used via the generated token. Steps to Reproduce Switch to the Organization workspace in the Censys web UI. Navigate to the Personal Access Token creation page. Create a new PAT. Use the PAT for API requests. Observe that usage appears to be tied to the Free-tier cr

Hi all,While working with Censys for some light tracking (exposed services + state changes over time), I started running into a recurring issue: it’s easy to detect changes, but harder to clearly show how they evolved. Instead of static snapshots or side-by-side comparisons, I’ve been experimenting with building a kind of timeline reconstruction of findings:capturing query results at different intervals sequencing them in chronological order highlighting when a service appears/disappears or changes stateI’ve been stitching these snapshots into short timeline-style clips using capcut. Not for presentation, but more as a way to visually scrub through changes over time, almost like replaying the exposure history. It actually made a few patterns easier to notice (especially short-lived exposures that are easy to miss in static data).Now I’m wondering:Is there a more “native” way within Censys (or related tooling) to visualize temporal changes like this? Do people typically rely on external

Hello,I am currently working with the get-files endpoint to fetch the list of files for a snapshot from the universal-internet-dataset-v2-ipv4 dataset, and I would like to clarify how to verify dataset completeness.For context, although I’m posting this from a personal account, I’m using API credentials associated with an organization headed by my research group supervisor, who has research access to data granted to his account.While retrieving the files for the snapshot universal-internet-dataset-v2-ipv4_20260317, I observed the following: Pagination proceeded normally up to page 100 Each page returned exactly 100 file entries In total, I obtained 10,000 files (indexed 0–9999) with no gaps On page 100, the response did not include a nextPage token Repeating the requests yields consistent results (same files), although the page tokens themselves change between runs I performed the following validation steps: Verified file size consistency against the expected size (sizeBytes) p

I recently got research access for the censys platform. I was wondering if that included BigQuery for the universal ipv4 dataset. If not, how would I go about getting it?

Hello,I have a few questions about the behavior of the certificate Timeline view. I would appreciate your clarification on the following points.As an example, while reviewing the Timeline for a particular certificate, I noticed some behaviors that I would like to confirm.Meaning of the "Results" count in the Timeline When checking the Timeline for the certificate, the UI shows Results: 178 (see attached screenshot). I would like to confirm what this number represents. Does this number indicate the total number of host observations (each timeline bar/event) rather than the number of unique hosts that used the certificate?   Timeline filters do not seem to be applied correctly When applying Port and Protocol filters in the Timeline, the results appear to include entries that do not match the selected filters. Port filter example: When filtering by Port 443, entries with other ports (e.g., 8080) still appear in the results (see attached screenshot). Could you please confirm this behavior

I tried to pay to activate my account on your platform, but my purchase card was not accepted.

I’m trying to leverage the API to fetch all matches without duplicates but I can't seem to identify which documentation covers the pagination. I know responses include next_page_token and previous_page_token but is there any official documentation on how these work?Does the last page have a next_page_token looping to the first page, requiring us to perform loop detection? Are these tokens/pages to be consumed immediately or can we consume these several minutes/hours apart? For example, if Censys gets new hits while we are processing the pages, are new results appended, ignored, or do they get inserted and potentially cause duplicates by shifting the pagination?I was unable to find pagination examples in the Go SDK which would have implied the correct usage, nor could I find other community topics explaining next_page_token beyond mentioning their existence.I would appreciate any insights or references to the docs,Thanks! 

Hello Support Team,I would like to confirm that if Censys Platform API has any rate limits, like 200 requests per minute, because I have got 429 errors when I tried to get hundreds of host information on my scripts.I know there is the Rate Limits about concurrent actions, but how about the number of requests in a minute?Thanks,

I have authority to pay for censys as long as it accommodates our needs. This is _exceptionally_ difficult due to the credit consumption. Get a query wrong or slightly incorrect, more credits. I don’t know about y’all but iterating when developing is EXECEPTIONALLY COMMON. This causes me to blast through all the credits (and budget) I have before I’m able to actually figure out if this is going to work.How can censys accommodate me and my goals??? Will it? Like, I’d be happy to use a “one year old” database (ie: not representative of live data) or be limited to “only” 10 results per request or literally anything along these lines.Can you, will you help me pay for censys? I just need to figure out how much it’ll end up costing me to figure out if I can even afford it.

Hello community,When you search for a host in the Censys WEB UI and open its details page, there is a RAW DATA tab that shows the host's data in JSON format, like this image:I would like to retrieve that exact JSON data via the Censys Platform API.I tried using the search query endpoint(https://docs.censys.com/reference/v3-globaldata-search-query) with the following query:host.ip="<IP Address>" OR web.hostname="<IP Address>"However the API response was different from what appears in the RAW DATA in the WEB UI.Should I use a different endpoint? Or is my query incorrect?Could someone advise on how to retrieve an API response that matches the RAW DATA shown in the WEB UI?Thanks for your help.

Hello,While analyzing some hosts in the Censys Platform (Web GUI), we found that the Services section sometimes shows “HTTP [many] / TCP” instead of a specific port number.The detailed view mentions that:“This host has multiple services detected on various TCP ports. Displayed as ‘HTTP [many] / TCP’ to indicate a combination of identified and sampled services.”We can identify the representative port using:"host.services.representative_info.sampled_port"Is there a way to retrieve a list of all TCP ports on which HTTP services were detected, other than the representative sampled port?Thanks in advance!

Hello, This is Takeshi.Does the Censys Platform API provide a way to retrieve credit usage data? If so, which endpoint should be used?

Hello, I’m currently on a Censys Solo plan and use ~250 of my 500 allowed queries monthly. I’m trying to figure out how my current usage would translate to the new Credits system on the platform. My understanding is that with the Solo plan, the queries are deducted from the quota for the initial query and for each “pagination” if a query returns multiple pages. So I can assume that my monthly usage is equivalent to ~250 pages of results. With the new Credits system, it seems to be the same, except that the cost is 5 credits/query (or 5 credits / page). This means that 250 legacy queries == 1250 credits. I must be missing something here since the new credits system seems to be a lot more expensive. Could you please clarify what would be the equivalent of that 500 queries quota with the new credits system? Thank you