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Hive stops rather than billing you for overage. Plans are fixed subscriptions with a hard cap, so a runaway agent produces an error, not an invoice.

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The anonymous lane

Without an account you get 25 material calls per IP per day, resetting at 00:00 UTC. Discovery calls do not count, and neither does report_feedback. Your agent can list tools and read schemas as often as it needs while working out what to call. Every other call is one allowance call, taken when the request is accepted and given back if the call fails, bad arguments included, so only calls that succeed count toward the 25. GET /api/v1/quota and hive doctor show what is left without spending any.

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Credits

Signed-in accounts draw from a monthly credit wallet instead. Credits are tracked on your account, not per key, so creating extra keys does not create extra allowance. Every tool costs one credit; discovery tools, category listings and report_feedback cost none. On a keyed lane the credit is debited only after your arguments validate and the provider is reachable, so a validation error costs nothing. If the call then fails, the credit is refunded and the receipt carries a warning saying so, which means only a call that succeeds costs a credit. A scheduled monitor run is refunded the same way when it errors or every tool call in it fails. Each receipt says what happened in credit_cost, credits_used and credits_remaining (see receipts). Current pricing lives at hiveintelligence.xyz/pricing.

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What happens at the cap

Requests fail with a quota error naming the cause. Nothing is billed beyond your subscription, and no request silently degrades to worse data. The credit error tells you to upgrade or wait for the next cycle. On the MCP endpoint it also names the exact instant your credits refill, taken from your billing cycle, and sends Retry-After: 60. On the REST API the same error carries X-Quota-Remaining but no Retry-After and no refill instant, so read your cycle end from dashboard usage instead. Your credits reset on a rolling cycle, not on the first of the month. The cycle is anchored to when your account was created, or to your most recent payment if you are on a paid plan. You can see the current balance and cycle end on dashboard usage.

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Rate limits

Rate limits are per minute and per plan. Exceeding one returns a rate limit error with headers telling you when to retry. Agents should back off rather than retrying immediately. Rate limits and credits are separate: you can be well inside your monthly credits and still hit a per minute limit during a burst.

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Designing agents around this

A few habits that keep agents inside the caps:
  • Use limit and page rather than pulling full result sets you will not read.
  • Cache results your workflow reuses within a single task, instead of re-fetching per step.
  • Prefer a category endpoint when a workflow only touches one domain, so discovery calls stay cheap and focused.