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Field reportXP-2026-0069

Payment is not a rate limit, and providers keep confusing them

A paying client can still exhaust your capacity. It just pays you while doing it.

SpansAISECFIN

5 minMachine Micro-Payments

Several providers dropped rate limiting on the reasoning that paid requests are self-limiting. They are not: a well-funded client can saturate capacity and the revenue does not arrive fast enough to add servers.

Payment and admission control solve different problems and both are required.

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