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.