At StatusCake.com we’ve always prided ourselves on not only have great premium product, but a free product as well that is unlimited and fully supported.

There are times however when we need to review how our product is used, and ensure that that a small number of free users aren’t having a detrimental effect on the rest of the service for all of our other users – free and paid.

Although we make the API available to all users, again free and paid, we’ve noticed an increase in the amount of free accounts that are making an excessive number of calls to the StatusCake application. Given that free accounts are checked on a 5 minute interval we’ve decided to impose a daily cap on the number of API calls that free users can make – 250. Any calls above this daily cap will be rejected.

We believe that the daily cap enables free users to still make full, legitimate use of the API, but ensures that excessive calls to do cause wider issues for our users.

Users will be sent an automated email notifying them when they have only 50 API calls remaining enabling them to either adjust the way in which calls are made to avoid going over the limit, or give them time to sign up to a paid plan where there are no limits on API calls.

You can find out how many daily API calls you have remaining by logging into the StatusCake application an clicking the “Account” tab. Full details can then be found by clicking the “API Key” button.