What should happen when a user hits your app’s limit?
Someone spends twenty minutes preparing an import. They click Run and only then learn that their file is too large for the plan.
What should the app do with the work they have already put in?
Offer a smaller batch
Save everything for later
Allow one exception
Ask them to upgrade
Each choice has a cost for the person using it and the person running it. Showing the limit earlier would help too.
I’m interested in this while building Inquir Compute.
Where do you draw that line in your own product?
A concrete example would help: what limit did someone hit, and what could they do next?
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Of your four, I'd pick the smaller batch, but run it automatically instead of asking. Process what fits, show the result, and keep the rest queued with the original settings, so upgrading is one click and not redoing twenty minutes of setup.
Our case is an SEO site audit where the free part covers the first 100 pages. The worst version would be telling someone with a 3,000-page site "too big" before anything runs. The useful version is 100 pages actually checked and a score they can look at, then the choice about the rest. People decide much better once they've seen what the paid part would give them.
The one-time exception I'd avoid. It teaches people to ask every time, and support quietly becomes the real limit.
@ksanyokm I would label that score as covering only the pages checked
How do you pick the first 100? Taking URLs in crawl order could miss an entire section so the sample matters as much as preserving the setup
@al_kub Fair point, and you're right that the sample matters. Ours starts with the homepage, then takes URLs from the sitemap in file order, then follows links level by level, and stops at 100. The results page says "100 of ~N pages scanned".
What it doesn't do yet is balance sections. If a sitemap lists 300 blog posts before the shop, the free sample is mostly blog. Taking a few pages from each top-level folder first would be a fairer 100, so I'm adding that to our list. Thanks for pushing on it.