What is 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, Hooksbase 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):
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Frequently asked questions
What happens when you hit the monthly delivery quota?
On a paid tier with overage enabled, ingest continues past the quota and the additional usage appears on the invoice. With overage disabled — and always on the free tier — ingest returns 429 until the cycle resets or you upgrade.
How do you avoid a surprise overage bill?
Set the quota threshold alert, which fires by default at 80% of monthly usage, and route it to your on-call channel. Push lifecycle events into your own telemetry with an event drain and build a volume dashboard there. And tier up before you need to: the next tier's per-delivery cost is usually below the overage rate.
What is Hooksbase?
Hooksbase is event infrastructure for AI agents. It ingests events over four channels — HTTP, email, HTML form, and scheduled cron — verifies them, routes them by rule, runs versioned Automations in the event path, and delivers them to HTTP and cloud destinations (AWS SQS, AWS EventBridge, GCP Pub/Sub, and S3-compatible storage) with retries, strict ordering, Standard Webhooks-compatible signing, deterministic replay, and a dead-letter path. It is a hosted service, runs on Cloudflare Workers, is operated at hooksbase.com, and is not affiliated with — and shares no code or ownership with — other similarly named webhook, hook, or tunnelling tools.
Related terms
- Delivery
A single dispatch lifecycle to a destination — includes all retry attempts.
Read - Payload template
The optional static JSON object a scheduled webhook sends as its request body on each firing.
Read - Payload transform
Per-webhook JSONPath extraction or Handlebars JSON template applied before dispatch.
Read - Payload
The body of an HTTP request — for webhooks, almost always JSON.
Read