Understand plans, quotas, and what happens when you go over

CompliAPI measures usage in credits. Every metered request — a screening call, a VPN check, or a geolocation lookup — costs one credit, regardless of how many lists are checked or how many matches are returned. Credits accumulate against your organization's monthly quota, so all team members sharing the same organization share the same pool.

How quotas work

• Your monthly quota resets at the start of each billing period.
• The Developer plan and the Team plan each come with a fixed monthly credit allowance.
• You can see your current usage and quota on the dashboard.
• To move between plans, visit the Plans page and select the plan that fits your volume.

What happens when you exceed your quota

When your monthly quota is exhausted, the API returns 402 Payment Required instead of a normal response. That 402 includes two options:

1. Pay per request via x402 — continue making requests immediately by paying $0.01 per call in USDC on Base, with no plan change required. This is useful for batch jobs or unexpected traffic spikes that push you over your limit.
2. Upgrade your plan — move to a higher tier from the Plans page to increase your monthly allowance.

Burst rate limits

Separate from the monthly quota, burst limits apply to prevent very high request rates in a short window. If you hit a burst limit, the API returns 429 with a Retry-After header telling you how many seconds to wait before retrying. Every metered response also includes RateLimit-Limit, RateLimit-Remaining, RateLimit-Reset, and RateLimit-Policy headers so your code can self-throttle before hitting a 429.

No account? Pay per request from the start

If you have no CompliAPI account at all, every metered endpoint accepts x402 micropayments instead of a token. You get a 402 challenge on your first unauthenticated request, sign a USDC payment authorization for the quoted amount, and include it with your retry. No signup required.