Policies

A Policy defines rate limits and long-term quotas for a Client. Attach a policy to prevent abuse, enforce fair use, and meet SLA requirements.

Rate limit vs Quota

Zerq supports two tiers of limiting:

Type	Purpose	Example
Rate limit	Short-term throttling — prevent bursts	100 requests per minute
Quota	Long-term cap — enforce monthly billing limits	50,000 requests per month

Both can be configured independently. A client hitting either limit receives:

HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "error": "rate_limit_exceeded",
  "message": "You have exceeded your request rate limit. Please try again later."
}

Creating a Policy

1. Go to Policies in the sidebar
2. Click New Policy
3. Fill in:

Field	Description
Name	Descriptive label (e.g., "Free Tier", "Enterprise Plan")
Description	Optional notes
Rate limit — Max requests	Maximum requests per interval
Rate limit — Interval	1m, 5m, or 1h
Quota — Max requests	Maximum requests per quota period
Quota — Interval	1d, 7d, or 30d

4. Click Create

Interval options

Rate limit intervals

Interval	Window
1m	1-minute sliding window
5m	5-minute sliding window
1h	1-hour sliding window

Quota intervals

Interval	Reset behavior
1d	Resets at midnight UTC daily
7d	Resets every Monday at 00:00 UTC
30d	Resets on the 1st of each month at 00:00 UTC

Attaching a policy to a client

1. Open the Client
2. Click Edit
3. Select a Policy from the dropdown
4. Save

The policy applies to all the client's active profiles combined — not per profile.

Disabling a policy

Toggle a policy to inactive to stop enforcing it without deleting it. This is useful for temporarily lifting limits during an incident or migration.

Designing policies for tiers

Common patterns:

Free tier:       100 req/min, 10,000 req/month
Starter tier:    500 req/min, 100,000 req/month
Business tier: 2,000 req/min, 1,000,000 req/month
Enterprise:    Unlimited (no policy attached)

Monitoring usage

View a client's current quota usage on the Client detail page. The Metrics dashboard also shows request volumes per client filtered by time range.

→ See Observability