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PALM SOUQ

Quotas & tier enforcement

Tier-based token budgets that protect your bottom line.

Give every plan tier a monthly dollar budget, a token rate limit and a clear rule for what happens at the edge: warn at 80%, then downgrade or block at 100%. Enforced in the gateway, so no code path can skip it.

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Dollar caps · daily token limits · rolling TPM and RPM · concurrent request bounds
webhook · quota.warning
POST https://api.yourapp.com/hooks/palmsouq
X-PalmSouq-Signature: t=1794129262,v1=5b1f...

{
  "type": "quota.warning",
  "tenant": "northwind-ops",
  "tier": "pro",
  "period": "2026-11",
  "budget_usd": 35.00,
  "spent_usd": 28.14,
  "used_pct": 80.4,
  "next_action_at_100": "downgrade",
  "downgrade_to": "claude-haiku-4.5",
  "topup_url": "https://app.yourapp.com/billing/topup"
}

Quota editor

Configure a tier, then drag usage to see what happens.

Switch tiers, move the sliders, and preview a tenant crossing the soft cap and the hard cap. The policy below the preview is exactly what gets published to the edge.

policies / quotasdraft · not yet published
$35
80%
150,000

At 100% of budget

84% · $29.40
Soft cap: 80% reached

Requests still served. Webhook quota.warning sent once to your app so you can show an upgrade prompt or email the account owner.

quotas:
  pro:
    monthly_usd_cap: 35
    soft_cap_pct: 80
    tokens_per_minute: 150000
    on_hard_cap: downgrade
    downgrade_to: claude-haiku-4.5

Soft vs hard caps

Warn first. Then degrade or stop, on your terms.

Soft cap (default 80%)Hard cap (100%)
RequestsServed normallyBlocked with 429, or rerouted to a fallback model
Webhookquota.warning, sent once per periodquota.exhausted, plus quota.blocked or quota.downgraded
User experienceYour app can show an upgrade bannerFallback keeps the product working; block shows your message
ResetStart of next billing periodNext period, a top-up, or a manual override in the console
Typical useNudge upgrades, alert account managersProtect margin on flat-rate plans

Worked example

A support SaaS has 500 customers at $99/month ($49,500 MRR). 25 power users each consume $400/month of model spend. Capping them at $35 recovers 25 × ($400 - $35) = $9,125 a month, before any of them buy a top-up.

Rolling-window rate limits

One tenant's burst should not be everyone's outage.

Your provider gives your organisation one pool of tokens per minute. PALM SOUQ splits it with sliding-window TPM and RPM limits per tenant, so a single customer's batch job cannot starve the rest.

Limits are sliding windows, not fixed buckets, so a tenant cannot double its rate by straddling a minute boundary. Concurrent-request bounds cap how many streams a tenant holds open at once.

provider pool · gpt-4.1 · org TPM90% allocated
  • globex-ai28%
  • wayne-finance22%
  • acme-legalat limit · 429 rate_limited15%
  • stark-sales12%
  • 412 other tenants13%
  • headroom10%

Self-serve top-ups

Let customers buy more instead of hitting a wall.

  1. 01

    Soft cap

    quota.warning arrives with a topup_url for that tenant.

  2. 02

    Prompt

    Your app shows a banner or sends an email with the link.

  3. 03

    Purchase

    The customer buys a token pack in Stripe, Orb or Lago.

  4. 04

    Applied

    Billing sync raises the allowance; the next request uses it.

Lead ML EngineerSeries B sales intelligence SaaS
“Falling back from Sonnet to Haiku at 90% of budget kept the experience intact without blowing our monthly API cap.”

Quota questions

What units can a quota use?

Dollars per month, tokens per day, requests per minute, tokens per minute and concurrent in-flight requests. You can combine them: a Pro tenant might have a $35 monthly budget, 150k TPM and at most 8 concurrent streams.

Where are counters kept, and are they exact?

Counters live in edge memory and are reconciled across PoPs within a few hundred milliseconds. Dollar budgets are exact once each response's usage is priced; for the few in-flight requests at the moment a cap is crossed, PALM SOUQ uses the request's max_tokens to reserve budget so a tenant cannot overshoot by more than one call.

Can a customer raise their own limit?

Yes. Point the topup_url in the webhook at your billing page. When your billing system confirms a purchase, call the PALM SOUQ quota API (or let the Stripe, Orb or Lago sync do it) and the new allowance applies on the next request.

How do per-tenant TPM limits relate to my provider's rate limits?

Your provider limits apply to your whole organisation. PALM SOUQ enforces a share of that pool per tenant, so one tenant's burst cannot exhaust capacity for everyone else. Requests over the tenant limit get a 429 from PALM SOUQ with X-PalmSouq-Reason: rate_limited and a Retry-After header.

More of the platform

Give every tier a budget it cannot exceed.

Route your agent traffic through PALM SOUQ in 2 minutes. Change one base URL, pass a tenant header, and every token is attributed and governed.

14-day free production trial · 100k requests included · no card required

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