API Usage Dashboard and credit limits
As your applications and AI agents integrate more deeply with ToolYour, gaining visibility into your API consumption becomes critical. Without a clear understanding of your usage patterns, you risk unexpected service interruptions, inefficient resource allocation, and difficulty planning for scale. Whether you're leveraging our powerful REST API for programmatic access or orchestrating AI workflows with the Model Context Protocol (MCP), monitoring your API usage is key to maintaining smooth operations.
ToolYour connects AI agents to over 200 practical tools for tasks like SEO analysis, document processing, file conversion, and text operations. These tools are accessible via your browser, a REST API, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), all through one remote server. To ensure continuous access and optimal performance for your production workloads, you need a robust way to track your requests and understand your current consumption against your plan limits.
This guide will walk you through the ToolYour API usage dashboard, explain how to interpret your request counts, clarify how both REST and MCP usage are accounted for, and outline when it might be time to consider upgrading your plan.
Where to find usage
Accessing your API usage data is straightforward. All your consumption metrics are consolidated in one central location within your ToolYour account dashboard.
To view your current API usage:
- Log in to your ToolYour account.
- Navigate directly to your dashboard at https://www.toolyour.com/dashboard.
- On the dashboard, locate the section related to "API Usage" or "Quota."
Here, you'll find an overview of your current month's successful requests, your remaining quota, and often a visual representation of your request trends over time. For a detailed breakdown specific to your API keys, you can also visit the API Keys section. This view provides insights into the overall consumption tied to your account, regardless of how many API keys you've generated. Each API key starts with the prefix ty_ and uses the X-Api-Key HTTP header for authentication in REST calls.
Reading request counts
Understanding what constitutes a "request" is fundamental to effective usage monitoring. For ToolYour, an API request only counts towards your monthly quota if it results in a successful tool call. Invalid requests, such as those with malformed JSON or incorrect endpoints, generally do not consume your quota.
All successful tool calls are measured in "credits." While most tools cost 1 credit per successful execution, some more complex operations might cost between 1 and 10 credits. Your monthly quota is expressed in these credits.
The usage dashboard provides a real-time view of your consumption. Your quota for all plans — including the free tier — resets on the 1st of each calendar month. This ensures you start fresh with your full allocation at the beginning of every new month.
For new users, the free plan offers a generous starting point of 500 free credits per month. This allows you to experiment with ToolYour's capabilities and integrate our tools into your development environment without immediate cost. The free plan also includes a throughput limit of 5 successful requests per minute, which helps manage traffic and ensures fair access for all users.
It's important to note that if you have multiple API keys associated with your account, they all draw from the same shared monthly quota. This means if you create a ty_production_key and a ty_staging_key, their combined usage will count against your single account's limit. You can learn more about managing your API keys and shared quotas in our related post, "API Keys, Free Tier, and Shared Quota."
REST vs MCP in one quota
ToolYour offers two primary interfaces for programmatically accessing its extensive catalog of over 200 tools: the traditional REST API and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Both interfaces tap into the same powerful backend tools, and critically, they share the same monthly quota.
REST API Usage
When you make a direct HTTP call to a ToolYour REST endpoint using your API key in the X-Api-Key header, that successful call counts towards your quota.
For example, making a call to convert a document:
curl -X POST \
https://api.toolyour.com/file-conversion/docx-to-pdf-converter \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-H 'X-Api-Key: ty_YOUR_API_KEY_HERE' \
-d '{
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.docx"
}'
If this call successfully converts document.docx to a PDF, it will count as one successful request (consuming a certain number of credits) against your monthly quota.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) Usage
ToolYour is a leading platform embracing the Model Context Protocol (MCP), designed to help AI agents seamlessly interact with practical tools. ToolYour acts as a remote MCP server, enabling AI agents (like those powered by Anthropic's Claude or Cursor) to discover, understand, and invoke real-world tools for tasks spanning SEO, document processing, and more. You can find more details on integrating MCP with ToolYour at https://www.toolyour.com/developers/mcp.
When using ToolYour via MCP, navigating or exploring the tool catalog, such as listing available tools via discover_tools, does not consume your quota. This allows agents to browse and understand capabilities without incurring costs. However, when an AI agent runs a tool through MCP, that execution does count towards your monthly quota, just like a REST API call.
Consider an AI agent using MCP to solve a task:
{
"goal": "Summarize the key points from the provided video URL.",
"input": {
"video_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
},
"tools": [
{
"tool_id": "ai-video-summarizer"
}
]
}
If your agent sends this solve_task request (targeting, for instance, the AI Video Summarizer) to https://api.toolyour.com/mcp and it successfully executes, it will count towards your monthly API quota.
Important note on solve_task maturity: The solve_task capability within MCP is currently in an early phase. ToolYour is continually enhancing its routing, workflows, and tool coverage to make solve_task more robust. While it's powerful for many scenarios, you might sometimes receive a status: suggest response, indicating the agent needs more specific guidance or confirmation. For production-critical workflows where precise control is paramount, we recommend a more explicit agent-driven approach: use discover_tools to find relevant capabilities, then get_tool_schema to understand their inputs, and finally invoke_tool to execute the specific tool directly. This method ensures deterministic execution and is ideal for workflows requiring high reliability.
Both REST and MCP are powerful ways to integrate ToolYour's capabilities into your applications and AI agents, and their combined usage is transparently reflected in your dashboard.
Approaching limits
Monitoring your usage dashboard is crucial for proactive management. As your account approaches its monthly credits limit, the dashboard provides clear indicators. This is your cue to assess your current usage patterns and consider your options to avoid service interruptions.
If your account reaches its monthly quota, further API requests (both REST and MCP) will be blocked. This means your integrations will stop functioning until one of two things happens:
-
You upgrade your ToolYour API plan. Upgrading immediately grants you a higher quota.
-
The next calendar month begins. On the 1st of the new month, your quota automatically resets, and your services will resume.
ToolYour does not offer pay-as-you-go billing or overage charges. When your plan limit is reached, access is simply capped until an upgrade or the next billing cycle. This provides predictable costs and prevents unexpected expenses.
In addition to the monthly quota, remember that the free plan also has a throughput limit of 5 successful requests per minute. If you exceed this rate, even if you are below your monthly quota, requests will be temporarily throttled. Paid plans offer significantly higher throughput limits to support production-scale applications.
Regularly checking your dashboard helps you identify periods of high usage and anticipate when an upgrade might be necessary, ensuring your applications continue to run smoothly without interruption.
Upgrading plans
For teams running ToolYour in production, consistently hitting your free tier limits or requiring higher throughput is a clear signal that it's time to consider an upgrade. Paid plans offer substantially increased quotas and higher rate limits, designed to support professional and business-scale operations.
ToolYour offers tiered plans to meet diverse needs:
- Pro Plan: At just $10 per month, the Pro plan includes 20,000 credits. This provides a significant boost for growing applications.
- Business Plan: For larger scale operations, the Business plan is available for $21 per month, offering a substantial 100,000 credits.
Upgrading your plan is a simple process directly from your account dashboard or by visiting our dedicated pricing page. Choosing a plan that aligns with your anticipated usage ensures uninterrupted service and unlocks the full potential of ToolYour for your production applications. If you're weighing the benefits and features of different plans, our post "When to Upgrade Your ToolYour API Plan" provides further guidance.
FAQ
Q: What exactly counts towards my ToolYour API quota? A: Only successful tool calls count towards your monthly API quota. Invalid requests, such as those with incorrect parameters or malformed JSON, generally do not consume your quota. Each successful tool call consumes between 1 and 10 "credits," depending on the complexity of the tool.
Q: How often does my API quota reset? A: Your ToolYour API quota, for all plans including the free tier, resets on the 1st day of each calendar month. This means you get a fresh allocation of credits at the start of every month.
Q: Do my multiple API keys have separate quotas?
A: No, all API keys associated with a single ToolYour account share the same monthly quota. Usage across all your ty_ prefixed keys (whether for production, staging, or development) is aggregated against your account's total limit.
Q: Does browsing the MCP catalog use up my quota?
A: No, browsing or exploring the ToolYour tool catalog via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) using functions like discover_tools does not consume your quota. Quota is only used when an AI agent successfully runs or invokes a specific tool through MCP.
Q: What happens if I hit my credit limits? A: If you reach your monthly credits limit, further API requests (both via REST and MCP) will be blocked. Your integrations will cease to function until you either upgrade your ToolYour plan or your quota resets on the 1st of the next calendar month. ToolYour does not have overage charges or pay-as-you-go billing.
Q: Are there any throughput limits on ToolYour API usage? A: Yes, in addition to the monthly quota, there's a throughput limit. For the free plan, this is 5 successful requests per minute. Paid plans offer significantly higher per-minute rate limits to accommodate production-level usage.
Conclusion
Effective management of your ToolYour API usage is paramount for maintaining reliable and scalable applications. The API usage dashboard at https://www.toolyour.com/dashboard provides the essential visibility you need to monitor consumption, understand billing cycles, and anticipate when an upgrade might be necessary. By keeping an eye on your successful request counts, knowing how both REST and MCP operations contribute to your shared quota, and understanding the implications of reaching your limits, you can ensure your integrations with ToolYour remain robust and uninterrupted.
Whether you're developing AI agents or building custom applications, ToolYour empowers you with practical tools. Proactively managing your API usage helps you scale confidently and efficiently.
Ready to optimize your usage or scale up?
- Check your current usage: https://www.toolyour.com/dashboard
- Explore plan options: https://www.toolyour.com/pricing
- Dive deeper into developer documentation: https://www.toolyour.com/developers/docs