Quotas

Terms

• Quota is what your plan allows: every tool that counts has an hourly and a daily limit.
• A bucket is one kind of lookup, such as whois or query. Each tool call counts against one bucket, and each bucket has its own limits. The website counts against the same buckets.

How calls are counted

MCP calls count against your NameBeta plan, in the same buckets as the website. A WHOIS lookup on namebeta.com and a lookup_whois call spend the same quota, and both appear under Plan & Usage in your account panel.

• Only tools/call counts. initialize, tools/list, ping and other protocol requests are free.
• One call counts once, whatever it contains. A check_availability call with 20 domains counts as one.
• suggest_domains is free, as suggestions are on the website.
• The call counts when it is accepted, before the tool runs. A call that ends in a tool error — an invalid domain, a WHOIS server that does not answer — still counts. A call to an unknown tool does not.
• A rejected call does not count. When you are over a limit, the 429 response costs nothing.
• Your plan decides the limits. MCP always runs as a signed-in user, so the anonymous limits of the website never apply.

Limits

A call has to fit within both the hourly and the daily limit of its bucket.

Tool	Bucket	Free (hour / day)	Pro (hour / day)	Business (hour / day)	Enterprise (hour / day)
check_availability with any bare label	query	90 / 450	360 / 1,800	600 / 3,000	Unlimited
check_availability with full domain names only	check	45 / 135	120 / 360	300 / 900	Unlimited
compare_prices	single	150 / 250	1,200 / 3,600	2,000 / 8,000	Unlimited
suggest_domains	Not counted
lookup_whois	whois	5 / 15	60 / 200	150 / 500	Unlimited
lookup_dns	dns	20 / 50	200 / 400	500 / 1,000	Unlimited

check_availability counts against one of two buckets depending on its input; see its Quota section. Plans and prices are on namebeta.com/pricing.

When limits reset

Windows are in UTC

Quota windows are fixed and aligned to UTC, whatever your time zone:

• Hourly limits reset at the start of every UTC hour: 13:00, 14:00, 15:00 UTC and so on.
• Daily limits reset at 00:00 UTC. That is 08:00 in Beijing, 09:00 in Tokyo, and 16:00 or 17:00 the previous day in San Francisco.

The windows are not rolling. Calls made at 13:59 UTC and 14:00 UTC fall into different hours, so a full hourly quota becomes available again at the top of every UTC hour.

Over the limit: 429 and Retry-After

A call over either limit is rejected at the HTTP level, before it reaches the tool:

HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Retry-After: 1260
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
    "error": {
        "code": -32000,
        "message": "MCP hourly quota exceeded.",
        "data": { "retryAfter": 1260 }
    },
    "id": 7
}

Part	Value
Status	Always 429 Too Many Requests, for hourly and daily limits alike
Retry-After header	Seconds until the exceeded window resets: 1–3600 for hourly, 1–86400 for daily
error.code	-32000
error.message	MCP hourly quota exceeded. or MCP daily quota exceeded.
error.data.retryAfter	The same number of seconds as Retry-After
id	The id of your request

The daily limit is checked first. When both limits are spent, the response reports the daily one, and Retry-After points at 00:00 UTC — retrying at the next hour would fail again.

What clients should do

• Wait at least Retry-After seconds before calling the same tool again. Retrying sooner is rejected with another 429.
• Other buckets are unaffected. After lookup_whois hits its limit, lookup_dns and compare_prices keep working.
• Tell the user when the limit resets rather than retrying in a loop. For a daily limit, the wait can be most of a day.