Monthly Quota Usage
How your monthly quota is used for reports
You may notice in your account that you have your monthly quota, for example 1,000,000 reports, and then Accepted, Filtered, Rejected and Sampled reports. These different categories of reports count differently towards your quota and this is how:
Accepted
These reports count directly towards your quota so if you have 500,000 Accepted reports in total, you have used 50% of your monthly quota with them. These reports will show on the Graphs page and the Reports page and can be viewed as you would expect throughout our site.
Filtered
These reports do not count towards your monthly quota and will not show up in the Reports or Graphs pages in your account. Reports that are marked as Filtered are controlled by you on the Filters page of your account. Depending on the configuration of your filters, you may see very few Filtered reports or you may see large quantities of Filtered reports. As the Filtered reports do not count towards your quota, we strongly advise you to properly configure your filters!
Rejected
These reports do not count towards your monthly quota and will not show up in the Reports or Graphs pages in your account. Reports that are marked as Rejected are controlled by us and we discard them on your behalf. We may discard these reports because they are malformed and cannot be processed, they are caused by a known browser bug, have been reliably identified as spam/false-positive or for a variety of other reasons including your account exceeding the monthly report quota.
Sampled
High-volume accounts may have sampling enabled, which reduces the number of reports counted towards your quota. Sampled reports count at 25% of their actual volume, so for every 4,000,000 sampled reports, only 1,000,000 will count against your quota. You can find out more about sampling on the Sampling page.
How your monthly quota is renewed
For both paid and free customers, your monthly quota is renewed in the same way. At 00:00:00 UTC on the 1st day of each month, your quota begins to count towards a new calendar month. If you had exceeded your quota in the previous month then your reports will start being processed again at this point. If you had not exceeded your quota then there will be no interruption in the processing of reports.
What happens if your account goes over quota
First of all, there is no 'bill shock' on Report URI. If your account consumes all available quota for the current month then new reports will no longer be processed and will count towards the Rejected reports mentioned above. This means you can't get a nasty surprise if you suddenly find yourself sending more reports than usual, the worst that will happen is a temporary suspension of processing reports.
If you do go over quota and report processing is suspended for your account (a state we refer to internally as 'lockdown') then you have two choices on how to proceed:
- Wait for the 1st of the following month when your quota will renew and reports will be processed again. Please note that reports sent while you are over quota are lost and can't be recovered. This is why we advise the second option.
- Upgrade your plan to a larger quota and reports will begin processing again immediately resulting in a minimal amount of missed reports.
We understand that configuration errors or unexpected traffic volumes can cause a surge in reports and this is why we don't surprise you with a large bill during a difficult time. However, we do recommend that if you are regularly exceeding your quota and report processing is being suspended, you are missing potentially important reports and should upgrade your account to a higher plan. Plan upgrades can take place at any time on a pro-rata basis for days already passed in the month. Accounts can be downgraded to a lower plan at any time too and you will be billed the new lower rate the following month, so you can flexibly upgrade and downgrade on an as-needed basis