Rate Limits

How hourly budgets for metered nodes work, what happens when a feed runs out, and how to read your feed's Rate limits page.

Two nodes run every post they judge through a GPU, so each has an hourly budget per feed: Natural Language and Ask a Question. Everything else your feed does is unmetered.

The two budgets are separate and never pooled. Running out of one doesn't touch the other.

Natural Language: 2,000 posts judged per feed per hour. One charge per post the node judges.
Ask a Question: 500 questions asked per feed per hour. One charge per question per post, so each Ask a Question node in a feed is charged separately for the same post.

A metered node inside a custom node you've installed counts against your feed's budget just like one you placed yourself. For how to write these nodes and keep them inside budget, see Natural Language and Ask a Question Nodes.

What happens when a budget runs out

Running out is quiet by design. Your feed doesn't stop or show an error; posts that arrive after the budget is gone simply aren't judged by that node until the hour turns over. Each node answers with what you chose in its Admit posts when over budget switch:

Off (the default): the node matches nothing, so your feed draws only on whatever else it has.
On: the node stops filtering and lets posts through unjudged.

Because a throttled hour looks just like an hour where nothing matched, Graze shows you when it happened:

On your dashboard, a banner appears if any of your feeds ran out of budget in the last 7 days, for example "Election Watch ran out of its hourly budget in the last 7 days, leaving 3,412 posts unjudged." Click See what happened to open that feed's Rate limits page.
In the editor's Rules menu, both nodes carry a metered badge.

Finding the Rate limits page

Open your feed's page. If the feed has a Natural Language or Ask a Question node, a gauge button labelled Rate limits appears in the header. The gauge turns amber when a Natural Language node has nothing narrowing what it's asked about. The button only appears on wider screens, and only for feeds with a metered node.

What's on the page

The page has one section per budget your feed uses (Natural Language and/or Ask a Question). Each section has:

Usage so far this hour, for example "1,240 of 2,000 posts this hour", with a bar that turns amber when you're close and red when you've run out.
Up to two short notes drawn from your feed's own numbers, shown only when there's something worth saying. For example: "Nothing narrows what this node is asked about", "This budget is counted per question, not per post", "This feed hit its limit in 6 of the last 72 hours it was active", "Your busiest hour used 1,800 of 2,000. A busier one would run out.", or that one condition takes most of the budget.
Hour by hour: a chart of what was judged ("Judged") and what wasn't ("Not judged (over budget)") each hour, with the budget drawn as a line. Choose 3 days, 7 days or 30 days.
When it ran out: a table of every hour the budget was used up, with the hour, the time it ran out, how many posts were judged and not judged, and the limit that applied. Below it, a sentence says what the node did during those hours. If it never ran out, it says "Never, in this window."
The nodes spending it (or The node spending it): each metered node, with its criterion, operator and threshold, and how many posts it judged (and skipped) in the selected window. Edit this feed opens the editor.
A button to ask for more budget, and any raised budget (carve-out) your feed has been given. Both are explained below.

If your feed has no metered nodes, the page says so and explains which nodes are metered.

If the page says "Usage history is not available right now." your limits still apply exactly as before; Graze just can't show the history at the moment. "This deployment is not recording it." means history isn't being recorded at all.

Asking for a higher budget

You can ask before you run out, not only after. In each budget's section:

Click Ask for more posts (or Ask for more questions).
Optionally enter how many you need per hour.
Tell Graze why the feed needs more, even briefly. The budget's recent usage is sent with your request, so you don't need to quote numbers.
Click Send request.

While it's open you'll see "Your request is with us", marked Waiting for a decision. Nothing changes until it's answered, and you can Withdraw it. If it's declined you'll see "We could not raise this one" with any note, and you can Ask again.

Requests are per budget: asking for more Ask a Question budget doesn't change your Natural Language budget.

Carve-outs

A carve-out is a raised budget Graze has authorized for your feed. Each one shows its new hourly amount, the reason, when it was granted, any end date, and whether it's In force, Revoked or Expired. Ended carve-outs stay listed, so you can see if a higher limit your feed relied on has stopped. If your feed has none, the section says you're on the standard budget.

Debug has its own budget

When you test posts in Debug, Natural Language and Ask a Question nodes are charged to your own hourly Debug budget, never to the feed's. Each person gets 1,000 Natural Language posts and 500 Ask a Question questions an hour in Debug. If you run out, Debug tells you when it resets, and the affected posts show No verdict rather than a pass or fail. See Debugging a Post.