Replicate throttles harder when credit drops below $20: Sume 402

Replicate lowers your API rate limits as your account credit shrinks and says a balance above $20 with auto-reload avoids that; Sume instead refuses a job outright with 402 insufficient_credits before provider work starts. One slows you down near zero, the other stops you at the submit call.

Replicate's rules are on its rate limits page; Sume's are in Errors and rate limits and Generation admission, read 2026-10-02.

What are Replicate's numbers?

Replicate lists 600 requests per minute for creating predictions and 3000 per minute for all other endpoints, with short bursts allowed before throttling. A throttled call gets a 429 with a message that the rate limit resets in about 30 seconds.

The credit rule is the unusual part: as your credit decreases, stricter limits apply automatically, to prevent accidental overspending. Accounts with granted credits but no payment method get 1 request per second, capped at 6 per minute. Higher limits need a support request.

What does Sume do near zero balance?

Sume checks spendable USD balance at admission. If it cannot reserve the estimated cost, the submit fails with 402 insufficient_credits before provider work starts. Its docs tell you to upgrade the plan, wait for included Gen$, or submit a cheaper request, and not to invent prepaid top-ups.

Nothing on these pages says Sume lowers a request rate as balance falls. A low balance does not slow your calls; it only rejects the one that cannot be reserved.

How should a batch job handle each?

On Replicate, a batch near a low balance can look like a rate-limit bug. Check the balance before blaming concurrency. On Sume, a 402 is not retryable by waiting a few seconds, so route it to a human or a smaller request rather than the 429 backoff loop.

Sume exposes /v1/balance and /v1/usage so you can read the balance and ledger before a large run. Failed jobs and failed queue admission release or refund the reservation where applicable, so a 402 on one job does not leave stray holds from the others.

Does Sume have a free tier like Replicate's granted credits?

These pages do not describe a granted-credit rate cap for Sume. Sume's plans and included Gen$ are covered on its pricing pages; for how a first run is billed, read the Core workflow usage section before you size a batch.