Soft Limit Policy - What Happens If We Exceed our Request Limit for the Month?
Many times we get the question, “What happens when you go over our monthly limit?”
Soft Limit Policy
We practice a soft limit policy that does NOT automatically cut customers off if they go over their limits.
We ask customers to upgrade or chat with us to help diagnose why the account bandwidth or request usage was higher than expected.
What’s That Mean?
We know sometimes it’s hard to know how many requests you’ll have when you’re setting up, debugging, and getting our two systems integrated.
Many times demand is driven by website visitors, and a positive increase in website visitors can cause an unexpected increase in requests.
Additionally, bugs pop up sometimes that cause unexpected spikes in usage.
All of these situations can cause a spike in usage before you even realize it.
We don’t want success, bugs, or the discovery phase of your usage to ever cause your applications to suddenly stop.
That’s why we practice the soft limit policy.
This policy is not scalable and takes a lot of manual labor/time to follow, track, and administer. But it’s important to the entire team that we never cut off a customer without a human reviewing the situation.
Unlike other large tech companies that punish first and ignore your questions second, we’re humans behind the system and we do our best to treat you like a human too.
What Happens As We Reach Our Limit?
The way we’ve designed our soft limit policy is such that we send emails to your XLRoutes administrator when your usage reaches 80%.
Once you reach 100%, a member of our Support team will reach out personally via email and request you upgrade and/or let us know what’s going on so we can make a judgement call whether a plan change is required.
Many times we can help debug why the spike occurred, or arrange to go over for one month until usage returns to normal.
Basically, our goal is to allow customers the flexibility to experiment, grow, and work on their business without interruptions from XLRoutes imposing an automatic suspension of the service for an unforeseen issue.
We just ask that, if that happens, you get in touch and work out the best way to go forward.
Soft Limits Are a Courtesy
Please note that repeated months of going over your paid limits, not responding to our requests to upgrade, and any other obvious abuse of this policy may result in XLRoutes pausing of your account immediately until the appropriate upgrades take place.
Trust us, we’ve been doing this for over a decade, we’ve seen many different attempts to cheat our soft limits and have a very limited tolerance for this type of behavior.
To avoid this situation, we encourage you to always reach out to us and help us understand your particular situation so we can work out an appropriate plan going forward.
Hopefully that clears everything up, but if you have any more questions about our Soft Limit policy, please contact us at Support.