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Money and volume

Search quota

Searching costs us money at the supplier, so it costs you money past a free daily allowance. Every response tells you exactly where you stand, and only calls that actually hit a supplier are ever counted.

The allowance

Free allowance1,000 billable searches per day
Beyond thatUSD 0.01 per billable search
Day boundaryMidnight in your account timezone, set on your partner account
Billed asA line on your monthly platform invoice, alongside your other usage — see billing.
SandboxFree and never counted, at any volume

The free allowance is subtracted before anything is reported for billing, so your invoice shows the searches you were actually charged for and nothing else. Your contract may set different figures; the portal always shows the ones that apply to you.

What counts as a search

The rule is one line long: a call is billable when it costs us a supplier call. Reading back a result we already hold is free, no matter how often you do it.

Billable — 1 searchFree
Creating a hotel searchPolling a hotel search you already created
Loading more results for a hotel searchRe-sorting or re-filtering results already returned
Changing a search's dates, destination, occupancy or price sortEverything on the WebSocket stream
Requesting the rates of a single propertyThe eSIM catalogue — countries, regions and plans
Creating a flight searchReading, booking, cancelling and modifying
Re-pricing a flight offer at the supplierEvery sandbox call

You never have to infer which side a call fell on: the response says so.

Quota headers

Present on every response, including free ones. They exist so that you can reconcile our invoice yourself rather than take it on trust.

Response headers
X-Search-Quota-Limit: 1000
X-Search-Quota-Remaining: 412
X-Search-Quota-Reset: 2026-08-30T00:00:00Z
X-Search-Billable: true
HeaderMeaning
X-Search-Quota-LimitYour free allowance for the current day.
X-Search-Quota-RemainingHow much of it is left. Reaches 0 and stays there; it does not go negative.
X-Search-Quota-ResetWhen the allowance refills, in UTC.
X-Search-BillableWhether this call consumed a search. Sum these and you have our invoice.

Running out

Nothing switches off. Exhausting the allowance moves you onto the per-search fee; it never turns a live search into an error, because a traveller mid-booking is a bad place to discover a budget.

  • If you would rather be stopped than billed, set a daily hard cap on your account in the portal. Calls past the cap are refused with 429 until the reset — an explicit choice you make, never a default.
  • Subscribe to search_quota.threshold so you hear about unusual volume from a webhook rather than from an invoice. See webhooks.
  • Cache aggressively on your side. Polling and re-sorting are free, so a results page that re-reads an existing search costs nothing — only a genuinely new query does.

Look-to-book

Supplier rate limits are shared across all Vacabee traffic, so an extreme look-to-book ratio can degrade availability for everyone. We monitor it and will get in touch long before it becomes a problem, but if you are planning a large price-comparison workload, tell us first so we can size it with the suppliers.
NextSettlement modesWho is merchant of record, per booking.