Rate limits and pools

What an account can call, and how fast, depends on its pool. Pools group models and carry an included daily allowance and a per-minute limit. GET /v1/models shows what applies to the calling account.

Pools

Pool	Opens	Models	Included per UTC day	Per minute
Public	At registration	ppocr-v6, dinov3, siglip2	100 calls	10
Free	After the first top-up	The public models and sam-lite	1,000 calls	60 (included calls only)
Paid	After the first top-up	Every model: sam3, paddleocr-vl and birefnet are available only here	Not applicable: billed per call	No fixed limit

• A registered account uses the public pool. Calls beyond the daily allowance are refused with 429 daily_limit_reached.
• A funded account (one that has been topped up) also gets the free pool. The first 1,000 calls per UTC day of each pool model are free; calls beyond that are billed from the balance.
• sam3, paddleocr-vl and birefnet are always billed from the balance. A call to a model that the account may not use yet answers 403 model_locked, and GET /v1/models reports what unlocks it in unlockedBy.
• The daily allowance resets at 00:00 UTC. The calls of an account are counted together, whichever key made them. A failed call gives its slot back.

The billing object of each response shows which pool covered the call and today’s count. See Billing.

Per-minute limit

The per-minute limit is a token bucket per account: the burst equals the per-minute limit and tokens refill continuously. Exceeding it answers 429 rate_limited with a Retry-After header. The limit is shared by every key of the account and is the one of the pool that serves the model.

On a funded account the free pool’s 60 per minute paces the included daily calls only. A call beyond the daily allowance, or one that arrives while the 60 per minute are in use, is billed from the balance at the normal price and is not rate limited; the allowance stays available for later calls and is not used by that call. Only a call that cannot be paid from the balance answers 429 rate_limited in that case. Concurrent calls remain capped by the account’s concurrency limit. Batch requests follow the same rule: a batch takes one token, and when none is left its items are billed instead of free. Registered accounts (public pool only) keep the 429.

When the account has no fixed limit, a shortage of GPU capacity is reported as 503 model_busy or 503 model_unavailable instead.

Reading the limits

GET /v1/models is free, not metered and not rate limited by pool. Each model carries the fields that describe the calling account.

Field	Meaning
available	Whether the account may call the model now.
pool	The pool serving the account: public, free or paid. null when the model is not available.
freeDailyCalls	Included calls per UTC day at no charge. null when there is none.
perMinute	Calls per minute. null when there is no limit.
unlockedBy	What unlocks the model when it is not available, for example top-up.

{
  "id": "ppocr-v6",
  "name": "PP-OCRv6 small",
  "task": "ocr",
  "endpoints": ["/v1/ocr"],
  "license": "Apache-2.0",
  "prices": [{ "unit": "image", "price": 0.25 }],
  "available": true,
  "pool": "public",
  "freeDailyCalls": 100,
  "perMinute": 10,
  "unlockedBy": null
}

Status codes

Status	Code	Cause	Action
402	insufficient_balance	The balance cannot cover the call.	Add credit.
403	model_locked	The pool or the key scope does not include the model.	Add credit, or use a key with the model in scope.
429	rate_limited	The per-minute limit was reached (funded accounts: and the balance cannot pay for the call).	Wait for Retry-After, then repeat.
429	daily_limit_reached	The daily allowance of the public pool was used.	Add credit, or wait until the next UTC day.

See Errors for the full list.