# Rate Limits

> Rate limits depend on your account level, which is unlocked automatically based on your lifetime spend on the platform.

- Canonical: https://tchavi.com/en/docs/rate-limits

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Tchavi is pay-as-you-go: every user can call every model, and credits are the natural gate. Rate limits depend on your **account level**, which is unlocked automatically based on your lifetime spend on the platform — there is no subscription. Two independent limits apply per user per minute:

- **RPM** — maximum number of requests per minute.
- **TPM** — maximum tokens processed per minute (input + output). For TTS, each character counts as 1 token. For Whisper, each billed minute counts as 1,000 tokens.

## Account levels

| Account level | Unlocked at          | RPM         | TPM       | Max API keys |
| ------------- | -------------------- | ----------- | --------- | ------------ |
| Free          | Default              | 10 req/min  | 100,000   | 1            |
| Builder       | First top-up         | 30 req/min  | 500,000   | 3            |
| Growth        | 10,000 FCFA lifetime | 120 req/min | 1,000,000 | 10           |
| Pro           | 50,000 FCFA lifetime | 300 req/min | 3,000,000 | Unlimited    |

A global IP-based limit of 500 req/min also applies across all users sharing the same IP address.

## Exceeding a limit

When a limit is exceeded you receive a `429` response with a `Retry-After` header indicating how many seconds to wait before retrying. Your current level, RPM budget, and TPM budget are always visible in the `X-RateLimit-*` response headers (see [Credits & Billing](/en/docs/credits)).