SearchItems vs GetItems API: pick by call budget

SearchItems vs GetItems API: pick by call budget
PA-API gives you 8,640 calls/day at the entry tier (scales with sales). Two main operations:
— GetItems: fetch known ASINs, up to 10 per call — cheap, deterministic, ideal for refreshing a fixed product set
— SearchItems: keyword discovery, 1 search per call returns ~10 items — burns budget fast, great for auto-populating new pages
A site refreshing 5,000 ASINs hourly via GetItems uses ~500 calls; the same via SearchItems would blow the daily cap.
So what: use SearchItems once to discover, cache the ASINs, then refresh forever with batched GetItems. Treat SearchItems calls as expensive — they're your scarcest API resource.