Rivul MCP Usage and Fair-Use Limits
Rivul MCP is free for every Rivul AI account, with no quota. Fair-use rate limits stop runaway clients; usage_status shows today's usage.
Rivul MCP is free
Every Rivul AI account can use Rivul MCP at no cost. There is nothing to buy, no balance to run down, and no daily or monthly quota.
Rivul MCP still records each search and paper lookup, so you can see what a client is doing and so the fair-use limits below can work. Recorded usage is for your information only.
Fair-use rate limits
Fair-use limits apply per key and per account, per minute, per hour, and per day. They exist to stop a runaway client, such as an agent stuck in a loop, from overloading the index for everyone else.
An operator can also pause Rivul MCP or cap a single workspace as an incident control. Usage is recorded per UTC calendar day.
A workspace can hold one active MCP key at a time. Revoke it to create a new one.
Check your usage
Ask your AI client to call usage_status. It reports the workspace, the current UTC day, and used, limit, and remaining for the MCP channel. limit and remaining are null unless an operator cap has been set, which is the default.
usage_status never counts toward usage, so you can call it at any time to tell failure modes apart. A revoked key returns HTTP 401 Invalid Rivul key, while a rate limit asks the client to retry later.
When a limit is reached
Search and paper-lookup calls stop succeeding and report the limit rather than returning partial results. usage_status still answers, although a per-minute rate-limit window counts every call, usage_status included.
Wait for the window to pass and retry. A daily limit resets at 00:00 UTC. Creating another key does not raise the limits, because the account-level window covers every key in the workspace.
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