Gateway

Pricing & limits

What the hosted gateway costs and how much it lets through. Self-hosting the Community Edition is free and has no platform limits.

Pricing

100,000 hosted calls a month free (calendar month, UTC).
Then $1 per 100,000 calls ($0.00001 each), taken from your balance once an hour.
Only calls forwarded to your own providers count, including ones where the provider then fails. Calls we refuse (bad key, budget, rate limit) are free. Marketplace calls are billed at their own price instead.
When the free calls are used up and your balance can't cover the next call, hosted APIs answer 402 until you top up.
We email you (and show a notice in the console) when 80% of the free calls are used, when they run out, and when your balance is about to run out. Each charge appears under Billing → Transactions → Hosted gateway.

402

HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required
{
  "error": "your free hosted calls for this month are used up and your balance is empty; top up to keep calling",
  "statusCode": 402,
  "topupUrl": "https://pikeway.dev/console/billing"
}

Rate-limit tiers

Your tier is set by what you topped up in the last 30 days — not by your balance. Top up $100 or more in total within 30 days and you get the higher limits right away; they stay until those top-ups are more than 30 days old. Spending your balance never moves you down.

standard · < $100 / 30 days

10 requests per second (bursts of 20), 20 at once, 5 WebSockets, 10 MB request bodies, request details kept up to 7 days

high · ≥ $100 / 30 days

100 requests per second (bursts of 200), 200 at once, 50 WebSockets, 25 MB request bodies, request details kept up to 30 days

Timeouts: 10 seconds to connect to your provider; then it has 60 seconds (standard) or 120 seconds (high) to start answering, or you get 504. A streamed answer (SSE) can run as long as it keeps sending; it's closed after 60 seconds without data.

Over a limit you get 429 with Retry-After and X-RateLimit-Limit / Remaining / Reset headers (413 for a body that is too large), and nothing is charged. Console → Usage shows your tier and how much you topped up in the last 30 days. Your own limits per key, API or provider key apply within these.

Sellers' limits on marketplace APIs

A seller's limits are per buyer (calls per period, a per-second spike limit, and how many calls one buyer may have in flight at once), plus optional caps shared by all buyers; all are enforced exactly across all our gateways. If a seller answers 429 with Retry-After, we stop sending it calls for that long and answer 429 ourselves, without charging.

Prices, the free allowance and the tier threshold may change with 30 days' notice.