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.
Quota headers on every response: know your limit before you call
Most APIs make you guess where you stand on usage until something breaks. My Geocode takes a different approach: every single response, on every endpoint and every compatibility host, carries a full set of quota headers telling you exactly where you are.
X-Quota-Limit and X-Quota-Used give the basic picture for the calling key or network. X-Quota-Free-Remaining shows how much of the free daily allowance is left, and X-Quota-Network-Used reflects how much of that shared, per-network free allowance has already been consumed by any address or key on the same connection. X-Credits-Remaining shows prepaid credit balance for anyone past the free tier and not on an Unlimited package. X-Key-IPs-Used and X-Key-IPs-Limit track how many distinct addresses a given key has been used from, and X-Quota-Reset tells you when the daily counters roll over.
The reason this matters is simple: a script that can see its own quota can behave intelligently around it. It can slow down before it gets blocked, alert a developer when credit is running low, or switch from a free key to a paid one automatically rather than failing first and reacting afterward. None of that requires calling a separate usage endpoint or checking a dashboard by hand. The information rides along with the answer you already asked for.
This is true whether you are using our native endpoints or one of the seventeen compatibility hosts. A request shaped like a call to Google Maps Platform, Bing Maps REST Services, or ipstack still comes back with our quota headers attached, on top of whatever response body matches that provider's format. Switching providers does not mean losing this visibility, it means gaining it in places that never had it in the first place.
Every key gets a free daily allowance. Past it, requests draw on prepaid credit or are covered by an Unlimited package. Every response tells you where you stand in its headers, which is a small thing on any single call and a genuinely useful thing across a busy day of traffic.
For teams building anything more than a one-off script, we would suggest logging these headers alongside your own request logs from the start. A quiet trend in X-Quota-Free-Remaining running down faster than expected is a much cheaper thing to notice on a graph than in a support ticket. Full details on each header and what triggers it are documented at /docs/rate-limits/, alongside general authentication guidance at /docs/authentication/.