[coding123]

It can't be like that. I have discussions with vendors sometimes and the first question I ask - if something lapses and we weren't paying attention - you won't cut our service right?

I think too, in most cases, people would rather run over than cut service.

Also how would such a system work? Let's say you sign up for some API and what, set your billing limit to 500 requests per day. Let's say you're now hitting fabulous numbers / signups - but suddenly you start hitting that 500. If that shuts off your signups or what have you, you're typically going to be worse off than if you just pay the overage bill.

I know it sucks, but the first time you pay your overage is probably your last.

[Traster]

It's important to think about this in an a la carte design, not one fixed solution for all use cases.

Step 1: You give people the ability to put in soft limits - "Warn me when I hit 500",

Step 2: You also give the ability to put in hard limits "Pull the plug at 10k" (caveat to both these things - you guarantee this at an eventual consistency level, like "Well you hit 500 but by the time our stats updated you were at 600",

Step 3: You introduce rate limits - "We're expecting 500 in a month, warn us if we hit 50 in a day or 10 in an hour".

Step 4: You introduce predictive warnings "Our statistics show you'll hit your monthly limit on the 23rd of the month"

Step 5: You put in predictive limits to allow scaling - "The last 3 months we've seen the following use trend, warn us if we exceed double that trend, cut off if we see 50x that trend"

You might set some of these limits or none of these limits depending how predictable your use case is.

[nrmitchi]

> Let's say you're now hitting fabulous numbers / signups - but suddenly you start hitting that 500.

Sure, you get alerted, confirm it's reasonable, and then change your limits. You're also describing how many APIs actually work.

I'll say there is also a difference between going from 500 requests/day to 1000 requests/day, where you might say "this is probably legitimate and I want to run over", and from 500 requests/day to 25k requests/day.

One is mildly inconvenient, and the other is potentially bankrupting.

[thrashh]

If you’re expecting something near 500, then why would you set your limit to 500. Set it towards something like 20k at least.

Or obviously if you don’t think this will be a problem, you have control to set it to uncapped.

I don’t understand what argument you have.