Quotas & rate limits

Your plan includes a monthly allowance of operations. AI and web operations are metered separately, so heavy use of one never eats into the other.

Two categories

Every endpoint falls into one of two buckets:

Each category has its own monthly limit on your plan. The Free plan lets you experiment with AI endpoints without exhausting your web allowance, and vice versa. Your current usage and remaining allowance are always shown in the dashboard.

Cache hits don't count

When you hit a limit

If a request would exceed your remaining allowance for its category, URLpipe returns 429 Too Many Requests with a JSON body describing exactly which limit was hit and when it resets.

{
  "error": "quota_exceeded",
  "message": "You've used all 50 AI operations on your plan this month.",
  "category": "ai",
  "limit": 50,
  "used": 50,
  "resets_at": "2026-08-01T00:00:00Z"
}

Handling it gracefully

• Read resets_at and back off until then rather than retrying immediately.
• Widen max_age so more requests are served from cache for free.
• Watch usage in the dashboard and upgrade your plan before you run out if you need more.

Rate limits

Separately from your monthly quota, every request is rate limited per project (keyed by your API key) so a runaway script can't flood the service. Two ceilings apply at once:

• Up to 60 requests per minute.
• Up to 15 requests per 10 seconds (a short-burst ceiling).

Exceed either and URLpipe returns 429 Too Many Requests with a Retry-After header giving the seconds to wait. This response is distinct from the quota one above — its error is rate_limited, so you can tell "slow down" apart from "you've used your monthly allowance".

{
  "error": "rate_limited",
  "message": "Too many requests. Slow down and retry after 12 seconds.",
  "retry_after": 12
}