What we shipped this month: geocoding, IP, time zone and more
A roundup of recent work across the API: new compatibility hosts, faster time zone and elevation lookups, dashboard features, and clearer quota visibility.
A grace period before an unverified key pauses
Signing up and generating a key should not mean sitting around waiting for an email to arrive before you can actually test anything. New accounts on My Geocode get a grace period during which keys work fully, immediately after signup, whether or not the email address behind the account has been confirmed yet.
This exists for a straightforward reason: the moment right after signing up is exactly when someone wants to try their key and see the API actually respond, not read an inbox first. During the grace period, a new key authenticates and works exactly like any other, drawing on its own 2,500 free requests a day the same as a fully verified account, with the same quota headers on every response.
The grace period is not indefinite, though. If the email address tied to the account is never confirmed, keys on that account pause once the grace period ends, until verification is completed. This protects against accounts created with an email address that was never real to begin with, while still giving a genuine new user room to try the API before committing to the verification step.
Confirming an email address is a quick step available from the dashboard at any time, and doing it early removes any question of a key pausing later. For anyone planning to rely on My Geocode for something more than a quick test, verifying the account promptly is the simple way to make sure nothing interrupts a key partway through a project.
None of this affects pricing or quota behavior otherwise. A key inside its grace period, and a key on a fully verified account, both draw on the same free daily allowance, the same prepaid credit rate of €0.0001 a request beyond that, and the same Unlimited package option at €50 a month. The grace period only affects whether the key is currently active, not how much it costs to use or how it is metered.
If you signed up recently and have not yet confirmed your email, it is worth doing before the grace period ends, particularly if a key is already wired into something running unattended. Verification takes a minute inside the dashboard at /dashboard and removes the question entirely.