Frequently asked questions

The gateway answers 429 (usage_limit_exceeded) until the allowance refills or you upgrade — upgrades apply immediately. On a paid plan the allowance is your organization's, shared by its keys, and refills at the start of each billing cycle (counted from your subscription date, not the 1st). On Free it is one allowance from sign-up that does not refill. There's no overage billing: calls over the limit are refused, not charged, and the refusals do not count against you.

No, they're independent. The monthly limit is your plan's total call allowance. The per-minute rate limit (if you've set one on a key) caps burst traffic and resets every minute regardless of your monthly total.

The API Keys page shows each key's calls in the current cycle against the plan limit, plus its all-time total underneath — the same window the gateway enforces against.

Depends on how it's used. For server-to-server verification, your own backend gets a 401 or 403 with a reason — it's your integration's job to deny the request. For the Bot Protection snippet, an invalid, revoked, or expired key blocks the page from loading for visitors, with a message pointing the site owner at their dashboard — it does not silently disable protection.

Your trial key stops working after its 7-day window, and you get an email shortly before. Upgrading to a paid plan reactivates and extends any expired or trial key to the new plan's period — you never need to recreate it.

No — an invalid, revoked, or expired key always blocks. The only thing that fails open is BuildAPI itself being unreachable (an outage on our end), so our downtime can never take your site down.

Yes, once every 30 days, so one paid key can't be freely re-pointed at a new site on demand. Moving it always issues a new key value and stops the old one — update your snippets with the new value.

Each plan sets a limit (Free: 1, Starter: 3, Professional: 15, Enterprise: unlimited). You can't create another key past that until you revoke one or upgrade.

Client keys are retrievable any time from the API Keys page. Server (secret) keys are stored only as a hash for security and are shown once, at creation — if you lose one, rotate it for a new value.

Every paid plan auto-renews by default. You can turn auto-renew off any time from Billing — your plan and its keys stay active until the period you already paid for ends, and it simply isn't charged again.

We retry automatically. After repeated failures the org is downgraded to the Free plan rather than left in a broken state, and your existing keys adjust to the Free tier's limits.