Overage

Overage is metered usage past your tier's included monthly delivery quota. On paid tiers, overage is opt-in — you choose whether to allow it, and overage deliveries are billed at a per-delivery rate. On the free tier, overage is hard-blocked: once the quota is reached, ingest returns 429 until the next billing cycle.

Why opt-in matters

Most teams want predictable bills. Auto-overage means a runaway producer can spike your monthly cost without warning. The opt-in default is "no overage" — you have to explicitly enable it for a project.

When overage is enabled, paid-tier ingest continues past the quota; you see the additional usage on your invoice. When disabled, the relay returns 429 (rate-limited) once you hit the cap, and ingest is blocked until the cycle resets or you upgrade.

How to monitor approach

Three patterns to avoid surprise overage bills (or surprise outages from a hard block):

1. Quota threshold alerts — Hooksbase ships an alert that fires when monthly usage exceeds a percentage threshold (default 80%). Set it; route it to your usual on-call channel.
2. Drain rollups to your observability stack — event drains push lifecycle events to your existing telemetry, where you can build delivery-volume dashboards alongside other metrics.
3. Tier-up before you need to — if you're regularly approaching the quota, the next tier up usually has a lower per-delivery cost than the overage rate. Upgrade is cheaper than overage in steady state.

For the production-readiness checklist that includes quota monitoring: The agent production readiness checklist.