How API usage is counted

Monthly character totals are shared across this service's workers and retained across restarts. Each API key has its own allowance; anonymous demos use a separate allowance by IP address.

Characters and monthly allowances

The normalization endpoint counts the characters in your submitted text. The fusion endpoint counts the query plus each document's text. A character means one Unicode code point: a displayed emoji made from several code points can count as several characters.

Allowances reset at 00:00 UTC on the first day of each calendar month. The Developer plan includes 10 million characters, and Growth includes 1 billion. Configured demo, static-key and Enterprise limits can differ.

Growth is capped at its included allowance. Automatic overage processing and billing are unavailable; discuss higher volume before relying on it.

Reading your response

The normalization response retains its usage.plan, used_chars_this_month, monthly_limit_chars and remaining_chars fields. Both metered endpoints also return these accounting headers after accepting a reservation:

X-SIG-Usage-Month

The UTC calendar month for this request's character reservation.

X-SIG-Usage-Coverage-Start

The beginning of the measured period for that month. During the initial partial month, this is the accounting start above.

X-SIG-Accounting-Start

The original start of durable accounting, retained across subsequent months.

X-SIG-Pre-Accounting-History

unknown_not_imported: earlier usage is unknown and is excluded from this store.

These headers describe the request's committed reservation. Browser clients from an allowed origin can read them through CORS.

Failures and retries

• Characters are reserved before processing. A later processing failure can still consume allowance.
• A quota refusal returns HTTP 429. Unavailable accounting returns HTTP 503 and does not authorize new processing.
• A lost response or uncertain database commit can leave a reservation counted. Repeating a request can consume additional allowance; a missing response or header does not prove that no characters were counted.

The free reference audit has its own input and rate limits and does not consume this monthly normalization allowance.

Stored usage information

The accounting store contains salted identity digests, monthly character totals, reservation timestamps and the accounting-start record. It does not store submitted text, raw API keys, raw IP addresses or email addresses. Request-rate limits remain local to each worker.