---
title: "Stop AI agents burning your API rate limits - actionlake"
description: "One eager AI agent can burn a vendor's daily API quota before lunch. How actionlake paces calls, caches reads and caps each key to protect the quota."
canonical: https://actionlake.com/blog/your-rate-limits-are-safe
updated: 2026-10-22
---

Engineering

# Your rate limits, paced: how actionlake protects your API quota from AI agents

An enthusiastic agent can burn a day's API quota before lunch. Ours is paced, cached and capped.

**On this page**

Published 8 August 2026 Updated 22 October 2026 Engineering By the actionlake team

Every business system you run hands out a daily ration of API calls, and everything you operate shares it - your technicians' tools, your integrations, and now your agents. One eager loop polling for updates can starve all of it, and the first symptom is usually a human locked out of a tool mid-job.

**Give every key a hard cap, refused before dispatch. Start free and set one.** 100,000 free calls a month, no card.

[Start free](https://actionlake.com/console?start=sandbox)

## How actionlake spends your quota

actionlake treats your quota like the scarce resource it is. Calls are paced per vendor account, under the vendor's published limit, so the rest of your tools keep their share. Writes are never cached and never retried, because a POST that might have succeeded must not be replayed. Repeat questions come out of a cache shared across your tenant and touch no quota at all. And the `cost` tool tells an agent how much headroom remains - so it can see the ration, not just exhaust it.

## A hard cap on any key

Each key can carry a cap on the calls it may spend. A call past the cap is refused before it is sent: nothing reaches the vendor, and nothing is billed.

## What leaves the building

The result is that repeat questions never leave the building. What does leave is paced and accounted for, one run per request, with the key that asked on every row.

If you have ever had a vendor throttle your whole company because one script got excited: that is the problem this page exists to end. See [how the controls work](https://actionlake.com/trust) and [what a call costs](https://actionlake.com/pricing).

## Related guides

- [Guide · Control How to give an AI agent access to your business systems: permissions, approvals, caps and a record](https://actionlake.com/guides/ai-agent-access-to-business-systems)
- [Guide · MSP MCP servers for MSPs: Autotask, ConnectWise, HaloPSA, IT Glue, NinjaOne, CIPP and more](https://actionlake.com/guides/mcp-servers-for-msps)
- [Guide · Pricing How much do AI agent tool calls cost? Per-call, per-task and per-seat pricing compared](https://actionlake.com/guides/ai-agent-tool-call-pricing)

[← All posts](https://actionlake.com/blog)

## Ask one question across two systems.

[Start free](https://actionlake.com/console?start=sandbox) [See pricing](https://actionlake.com/pricing)

100,000 free calls a month. No card. Hard caps on every key. Cached answers are free.

---

Source: https://actionlake.com/blog/your-rate-limits-are-safe
More: https://actionlake.com/llms.txt