Tiers & limits

Quotas, freshness windows, async eligibility.

Five public tiers. Cached and cold calls are billed separately because they cost dramatically different amounts — see Economics for the why.

Quotas

Tier	Base / mo	Cached calls	Cold calls	When you hit the cap	Freshness window
Free (14-day trial)	$0	25	5	Upgrade to Starter	7 days
Starter	$99	500	50	Upgrade to Growth	24h
Growth	$399	5,000	250	Upgrade to Scale	6h
Scale	$999	25,000	1,000	Contact us for Enterprise	1h
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom	Negotiated	15 min

v1.0 is flat-only. When you exhaust your monthly cold-call budget, the API returns 429 cold_budget_exhausted until the next monthly reset. Upgrade to the next tier for more capacity. Metered overage for power users is on the v1.5 roadmap once we have stable cold-call cost telemetry — see Economics.

The Free tier is a 14-day evaluation trial, not a permanent free plan. It’s sandbox-only — no real fetcher access. You must add a card at signup; it auto-converts to Starter at trial end unless you cancel.

Freshness windows

When you call POST /v1/score and a recent record exists within your tier’s freshness window, you get it back instantly as cache_status: "cached" — no cold-call usage incremented. Only if the record is missing or stale (or you set force_fresh: true on Enterprise) do we run a fresh cold pipeline.

Tier	Window
Starter	24 hours
Growth	6 hours
Scale	1 hour
Enterprise	15 minutes

Shorter windows = more cold runs = more cost. Tier prices reflect that.

Async eligibility

POST /v1/score?wait=false is available on Growth tier and above. Free / Starter callers receive 400 { error: "async_requires_growth" } if they request it. See Async scoring for the full polling loop.

Circuit breakers

Two automatic safety nets cap cold spend on top of the monthly cap:

1. Per-key cold ceiling — 200 cold calls per hour, per key. Trips 429 { error: "rate limited", reason: "per_key_cold_1h" }. Rotates back open after the hour rolls.
2. Per-account 24-hour cold ceiling — 2× your tier’s monthly cold-call budget within any 24-hour window. Catches runaway scripts on a fresh key. Returns 429 { reason: "account_cold_24h" }. Email support if you’ve hit this legitimately and we’ll lift the cap by hand.

Both checks happen before the SFN execution starts, so a tripped breaker costs zero.

Watermarks

Every response includes an x_kepler block:

"x_kepler": {
  "tier": "starter",
  "cache_status": "cached",
  "freshness_window_hours": 24
}

cache_status: "cold" means this call ran the cold pipeline and incremented your cold-call counter. "cached" means a stored record was returned.