Quotas and plans

The account's plan sets how many validations may run in a monthly cycle. On an annual plan the quota cycle is still monthly: the year is split into months from the subscription's start date, and each month starts with the full quota. Quota is consumed on admission of the operation, before processing, so consumption reflects accepted operations rather than those rejected by validation.

An automatic retry consumes no additional quota: it belongs to the validation that already spent it.

Consumption headers

Operations subject to quota report the state on every response, with no separate query needed:

These headers accompany both successful responses and the quota-exhausted one. The X-RateLimit-* headers of the rate limits measure something else, requests per minute rather than validations per cycle, and besides appearing on every 429 they accompany the successful API responses to a request with an API key.

Exhausted quota

Once the cap is reached, operations subject to quota answer 429 with rate_limit_exceeded and a Retry-After header stating the seconds left until the next cycle.

The distinction from a rate limit is one of scale: a 429 from a rate limit clears by waiting seconds; one from an exhausted quota clears by changing plan or waiting for the next cycle. The Retry-After value tells them apart unambiguously.

The account receives a notice on reaching 80 % of its consumption and another on exhausting it, once per cycle.

Reading consumption

History reflects the current plan cap in each period: past plan changes are not preserved, so an earlier month is shown against today's limit.