What Happens if You Exceed Your Call Limit
Each API.Bible plan includes a monthly API call allowance. Users can monitor their current API usage from their dashboard. For more information, see How to Monitor Your Usage. What happens when your app reaches that limit depends on your plan and, for Pro users, whether overage protection is enabled.
Starter Plan
The Starter plan includes 5,000 API calls per month. When your app reaches that limit, it will no longer be able to retrieve content from the API until your limit resets at the start of your next billing period. API requests will begin returning limit-exceeded errors, causing Bible content in your app to stop loading unless your application handles those responses.. You won't be charged anything extra.
The Starter plan does not offer a way to extend your limit mid-month. If you find yourself regularly hitting the ceiling, upgrading to the Pro plan gives you a much higher monthly limit and additional options for handling traffic spikes.
Pro Plan
The Pro plan includes 150,000 API calls per month. If you hit that limit, what happens next depends on whether you've enabled overage protection.
Without overage protection (the default): Your app stops fetching content, just like on the Starter plan. You won't be charged anything extra, but your app's Bible features will be unavailable until your limit resets.
With overage protection enabled: Your app keeps working past the limit. You're charged only for the additional calls you actually use, at a rate of $1 per 1,000 additional API calls. For example, if you go 3,500 calls over your limit in a given month, you'd be charged $4 (covering four 1,000-call increments). Overage is billed in whole 1,000-call increments at the end of your billing period.
To enable overage protection, sign in at api.bible/sign-in, open your app, go to the Plan tab, and select Edit Plan. You can turn overage protection on and off at any time.
Managing API Usage
Regardless of which plan you're on, caching Bible content in your app is the most effective ways to reduce API call usage. When a user views a passage that's already been cached, your app serves it directly without making another API call. This applies to both Starter and Pro plans.
API.Bible permits caching, with two conditions: cached content must be refreshed at least every 30 days, and you may not cache more than 500 consecutive verses at a time.