Your monthly request quota

Your plan includes a fixed number of API requests per calendar month. That's your quota. It's separate from the per-minute rate limit, and the two fail in different ways — rate limits covers the technical behaviour of both.

The quota is per account#

This is the single most common surprise, so it's worth being blunt about:

Keys exist to separate environments and to be revoked independently. If you're creating keys to get more volume, the thing you want is a bigger plan.

What counts#

Every authenticated request that reaches the API, including ones that return zero results. A request that matches nothing still cost us the query, so it still counts.

/v1/health is the exception: it's unauthenticated, isn't rate-limited, and doesn't touch your quota. Use it for liveness probes rather than a limit=1 job query — that's what it's for.

Response size is irrelevant. One request returning 200 jobs with full descriptions costs exactly the same as one returning a single title.

When it resets#

At the start of each calendar month, in UTC. Not on your billing date, and not on a rolling 30-day window. A quota exhausted on 28 January is full again on 1 February at 00:00 UTC.

Buying a plan mid-month doesn't leave you with a stub of a month, though — a plan change starts a new period and refreshes the quota immediately.

Reading your usage#

The dashboard shows month-to-date consumption against your quota, plus a 30-day daily breakdown per key. The per-key view is how you find out which worker is eating the budget — the total tells you that you have a problem; the breakdown tells you where it is.

last_used_at per key is on the same page. A key with unexplained volume is worth investigating.

When you hit the limit#

Requests are rejected until the quota resets or you upgrade. Nothing is queued, nothing is throttled to a trickle, and there's no soft landing — the quota is a wall, not a slope.

Two ways out:

• Upgrade. A plan change refreshes your quota with the new plan's allocation immediately, so this unblocks you in a minute. It also starts a new billing period and isn't prorated — read that page first.
• Wait for the calendar month to turn over.

We don't bill overage. You can't accidentally spend $4,000 because a retry loop went feral — you just stop getting data. That's deliberate, and it's why the wall is abrupt.

Making the quota last#

The cheapest fix, by a wide margin, is bigger pages. limit goes to 200 on /v1/jobs and 1,000 on /v1/jobs/feed, and every page costs one request regardless of size:

50 pages × limit=20  = 50 requests
5 pages  × limit=200 = 5 requests   ← same data, 10× cheaper

The second cheapest is not re-crawling to find changes. Walking /v1/jobs to spot what's new is the most expensive possible way to stay current, and on Free or Starter it will exhaust the month before it finishes. Use the feed — one request returns everything since your cutoff. See syncing the feed.

Then: don't retry 401s and 404s. They'll never succeed, and each attempt is billed. See errors.

Custom limits#

If your volume doesn't fit the plans, or you'd rather have the data as files than as HTTP responses, write to [email protected]. Custom quotas and flat-file delivery both exist; neither is self-serve.

Next#