Frequently asked questions

The gateway starts returning 429 (usage_limit_exceeded) for that key until the next calendar month, or until you upgrade to a plan with a higher limit — upgrades apply immediately. There's no overage billing; calls are blocked, not charged extra.

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 this month's usage against the plan limit for every key, plus its all-time total underneath — the same monthly 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. Upgrading to a paid plan automatically reactivates and extends any expired or trial key to the new plan's validity — you never need to recreate it manually.

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, but it's limited to once every 30 days by default, so one paid key can't be freely re-pointed at a new site on demand. Changing it always issues a fresh key value automatically — update your snippets with the new one.

Each plan sets a limit (Free: 1, Starter: 5, Professional: 20, Enterprise: unlimited). You can't create another key past that until you free one up 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.