An automation should have a clear spending boundary before it starts collecting data. ProtoScrape's account credit budgets apply to Google SERP, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity jobs submitted through any of your API keys or the workspace.
Open Usage & limits to set a daily credit cap, a monthly credit cap, or both. Leave a cap blank for no limit. Credits are whole units: a successful Google SERP job uses 1 credit, Google AI Mode 5, ChatGPT 8 and Perplexity 4. These settings control scraping credits; they do not cancel a subscription, stop renewal payments or set a currency budget.
Reservations count toward the cap
The admission check adds three amounts: successful credits charged during the current period, credits held by every active job, and the proposed new job's cost. The job is admitted only if that sum fits both configured caps, and the account also has enough available credits and concurrency.
For example, with a daily cap of 20 credits, 8 credits already charged and 8 reserved, there is room for one 4-credit Perplexity job. A new 8-credit ChatGPT job waits until headroom is available. Concurrent requests use the same account limit.
Only a validated success becomes a charge. Failed, cancelled and expired jobs release their reservations. Retrying submission with the same idempotency key returns the existing job instead of reserving credits again. Exporting results or replaying a completion webhook does not charge another scraping job.
You cannot lower a cap below the current period's successful charges plus active reservations. Use Pause all new job admission if you want to stop new work immediately. Accepted jobs can still finish; you can cancel unfinished jobs separately.
UTC periods and batches
Daily caps reset at 00:00 UTC. Monthly caps reset at the start of each UTC calendar month. These are calendar periods, which can differ from your subscription's renewal period. A successful job is charged on its completion date. Reservations from jobs that began before a reset still count against the new period's cap until those jobs finish.
Accepting a batch does not reserve all of its quoted credits. Each pending input is checked when it is admitted as a job. At a cap, the batch shows a waiting reason and retains its original 24-hour admission deadline. Raising or clearing a cap, releasing a failed job's reservation, or reaching a new UTC period can let admission resume. The queue rechecks waiting batches; changing a cap does not guarantee immediate execution.
Pausing account admission does not extend batch deadlines. Cancel unwanted pending work instead of leaving it paused indefinitely.
Read usage from your application
API keys can read spending settings and usage. Changing limits requires a verified signed-in account in the workspace, so an application key cannot increase its own account budget.
curl https://api.protoscrape.com/v1/usage/limits \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $PROTOSCRAPE_API_KEY"
curl 'https://api.protoscrape.com/v1/usage/summary?from=2026-11-01&to=2026-11-05' \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $PROTOSCRAPE_API_KEY"
The summary accepts a window of 1–93 UTC days. from is inclusive and to is exclusive, so the example covers November 1 through November 4. With no dates, it returns the last 30 days including today. Add format=csv to download daily rows by engine. Reports have a limit of ten requests per minute per account, within the normal API request limit, and consume no scraping credits.
Counts distinguish admitted jobs, successes, failures, cancellations and expirations. Submission counts use admission dates; outcomes and charges use completion dates. A job admitted yesterday and completed today therefore appears in different daily counts. Pending batch inputs that never became jobs are excluded. Summaries contain counts and credit amounts, with no query text or result contents, and can outlive the seven-day result retention window.
Historical charges come from the credit ledger. When an older job's engine metadata has already expired, those credits appear under Unknown (older records). They are included in totals and caps. We do not guess the engine. The credit activity log remains available for individual reservations and settlements.
Respond to a budget limit
A new job that would exceed a cap returns HTTP 429 with daily_credit_limit or monthly_credit_limit. An account admission pause returns submissions_paused. These responses create no new job and reserve no credits. Respect Retry-After; repeatedly retrying cannot increase headroom. Reuse the same idempotency key when the request becomes eligible.
The low-balance setting compares your available credits with a chosen threshold. Reserved credits are already excluded from that available balance. The warning appears in the workspace and as low_balance in the limits API. Leave the threshold blank to switch it off. These warnings do not send email or automatically purchase credits.
Account caps apply across all keys. Separate project budgets, per-key reports and billing-cycle summaries are not available yet.