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.
Network allowance: why a shared office shares one quota
A twelve-person office sharing one internet connection looks, from the outside, like a single IP address making a lot of requests. That is exactly the situation our per-network free allowance is designed around, and it is worth explaining why we count it that way instead of counting every request as if it came from an unrelated stranger.
The free tier gives 2,500 requests a day from any address, with no key needed. That allowance is counted per network: all IPv4 addresses in the same /24 and all IPv6 addresses in the same /48 share one allowance together, whether or not any of them are using a key. A /24 covers 256 addresses, roughly the range a small to mid-sized office or building might sit within depending on how its network is configured. Treating that whole block as one allowance reflects the reality that it is very likely one organization, not 256 separate, unrelated users each entitled to their own free 2,500 requests a day.
This also closes an obvious gap that a purely per-address free tier would leave open. Without network-level counting, an organization could spread requests across many addresses, or generate many keys from within the same building, and effectively multiply a free tier meant for individual, modest use into something far larger. Counting per network keeps the free allowance meaningful and fair without requiring us to police individual accounts by hand.
It is worth being precise about what is shared and what is not. The free network allowance is shared across addresses and unkeyed traffic on that network. A key's own separate 2,500 free requests a day is not diminished by other unkeyed traffic on the same network, and it travels with the key rather than staying tied to wherever the key happens to be used from. X-Key-IPs-Used and X-Key-IPs-Limit on every response reflect how many distinct addresses a given key has been used from, giving visibility into that side of things as well.
For a business operating from a single, well-defined network, this usually means the free tier behaves exactly as expected: one shared 2,500 requests a day across the building, on top of whatever any individual key adds separately. X-Quota-Network-Used on every response shows exactly how much of that shared pool has been used at any given moment, so nobody on a shared connection has to guess how close the team is to needing prepaid credit or an Unlimited package.
Full detail on how quota is counted, including the header names involved, is documented at /docs/rate-limits/.