Know exactly how fast you are burning your free quota
Free tiers and trial credits are easy to blow through silently — then your app starts returning rate-limit errors at the worst possible moment. This monitor lets you enter your daily usage and your quota or remaining credit for OpenAI, Anthropic or Google AI Studio and shows you, in plain numbers, how long your free budget will last and whether you will reach the reset first.
How it works
Providers structure free access in two different ways, and the monitor handles both. Google AI Studio offers a recurring daily quota (requests per day), so the tool shows what percentage of today’s allowance you are using and warns when you will exceed the cap. OpenAI and Anthropic instead grant trial credit — a finite pool that does not refill on a fixed daily schedule — so the monitor treats your remaining budget as a pool, divides it by your daily usage to get a burn-down in days, and compares that against any reset date you supply.
How the two quota types behave differently
Understanding the structural difference between daily-reset quotas and credit pools changes how you plan:
Daily-reset quota (Google AI Studio): The counter clears at midnight Pacific time. If you use 95% of your daily allocation before noon, you have very little headroom for the rest of the day, even if yesterday you used almost nothing. Burst protection means spreading requests throughout the day matters — not just keeping the daily total in check.
Credit pool (OpenAI, Anthropic trial accounts): Trial credit is a one-time grant, not a recurring allowance. The burn-down is cumulative: 50 requests today and 50 tomorrow both draw from the same shrinking pot. When it is empty, you either upgrade or wait for any promotional top-ups. The key metric is days-remaining, which the tool computes by dividing your remaining credit by your average daily spend.
Reading the monitor output
- Percentage used (daily quota): shows how much of today’s allowance is consumed. A value over 80% is a caution signal; over 100% means you are already being rate-limited.
- Days until empty (credit pool): how many days at the current burn rate until your trial credit runs out. If that number is less than the number of days until your billing period starts, you should reduce usage or upgrade now.
- Will you hit the reset in time? The monitor compares your projected exhaustion date to any reset or billing date you supply. Green means you will reach the reset with credit to spare; amber means it is close; red means you will run out before then.
Tips to stretch a free tier
- Confirm the real limits. Free-tier numbers change frequently. The defaults here are estimates — override them with the exact figure from your provider dashboard before relying on the result.
- Cache aggressively. Identical or near-identical requests can be served from a local cache so they never touch your quota. For many applications, 30–50% of LLM calls are repeated questions that a simple key-value cache could absorb.
- Tier your traffic. Route cheap, high-volume calls (intent classification, routing, simple summarisation) to the most generous free model. Reserve larger or more capable models for genuinely complex tasks.
- Watch RPM and TPM in addition to daily totals. Many free tiers also cap requests per minute (RPM) and tokens per minute (TPM). A burst of 10 simultaneous calls can fail even when your daily budget is barely touched.
- Batch where possible. Some providers count requests rather than tokens; batching several questions into one prompt uses one request allowance instead of several.
- Set up alerting. Build a lightweight usage check into your application that logs quota percentage at startup so you are not surprised by a hard limit mid-demo.