Billing / Request lifecycle

Billing + Quota Flow

Follow one request from authentication to response and see exactly where the quota check happens.

Lifecycle

One request, step by step

01Authenticate
The API key or OAuth token identifies your organization, and the project and end-user headers set the scope.
02Classify
The request is classified as billable external traffic or an exempt first-party session.
03Check and increment
For billable traffic, the counter for that metric is checked and incremented in one atomic step.
04Serve or degrade
Within the limit, the request runs normally. At the limit, it returns the documented over-limit response instead.
05Record
The outcome is recorded for the usage dashboard and any alerts you configured.

Guarantees

You are never charged for a request refused at the limit — the check happens with the increment, not after the response.
Two concurrent requests cannot both consume the last unit of quota.
Reaching a limit changes the response, never your stored data.
Usage shown in the dashboard reflects requests that were accepted for processing, plus every memory those requests went on to store.

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