How do I fix "429 You exceeded your current quota"?

Check usage and billing in the provider's dashboard, and add credit or raise the limit. Look at the usage graph: a sudden spike means someone else is using your endpoint or key. Show users a friendly message when the AI is unavailable, and alert yourself.

429 You exceeded your current quota

OpenAI
AI APIs

What it means

Your AI provider stopped serving requests because the account is out of credit or has hit its spending limit. Every AI feature in your app fails until it is topped up.

Why it happens

Prepaid credit ran out, sometimes because a bot used it up.
The monthly spending limit was reached.
A billing problem with the card on file.

How to fix it

Check usage and billing in the provider's dashboard, and add credit or raise the limit.
Look at the usage graph: a sudden spike means someone else is using your endpoint or key.
Show users a friendly message when the AI is unavailable, and alert yourself.

Let your AI find the cause

Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor, Lovable or whichever AI built your app. It looks first and changes nothing until you have read the answer.

My app's AI features fail with '429 You exceeded your current quota'. Without changing anything yet, find every AI call, tell me whether each is protected by sign-in and a per-user limit, whether the key could be exposed, and what the app shows users when the AI call fails.