Alpic Docs

request-limit-exceeded is the Alpic reason code returned when a team on the Free plan has used every request that plan includes for the current billing period. Paid plans are never refused: requests beyond the included allowance are billed as overage. It is a stable identifier: match on it rather than on the message text, which may be reworded.

The response

The request is refused at admission. It never reaches your MCP server, and it is not counted against your plan.

HTTP status: 402 Payment Required
JSON-RPC error code: -32002 for clients on MCP 2025-11-25 and earlier, -31002 for clients on 2026-07-28, which forbids -32002
Alpic reason code: request-limit-exceeded, under the reserved alpic/reason key

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "error": {
    "code": -32002,
    "message": "Request limit reached for the current billing period.",
    "data": {
      "alpic/reason": "request-limit-exceeded",
      "documentation": "https://docs.alpic.ai/pricing/request-limit-exceeded"
    }
  },
  "id": null
}

What counts as a request

Every settled MCP request counts, whatever its outcome, including tools/list and server/discover. initialize and ping count for clients on 2025-11-25 and earlier; clients on 2026-07-28 never send them. Because the check runs at admission, a refused request is not added to your count. An elicitation counts as two requests: the tool call that asks the question and the one that carries the answer. The limit applies to the whole team, across every project and environment, for the current billing period. See Plans for the requests included in each plan and the overage rate.

Handling it in a client

initialize and server/discover go through the same check, so a Free-plan team over its limit fails at connection time. Most MCP clients render that as a generic “server unavailable” rather than showing the message, so treat a 402 on connect as a quota problem, not an outage.

What to do

Check the current period’s usage against your allowance on your team’s billing page in the dashboard, then move to a paid plan — see Plans. Paid plans keep serving requests beyond their included allowance and bill the extra, so this reason code cannot be returned once you are on one. A new billing period starts your count again from zero.

​The response

​What counts as a request

​Handling it in a client

​What to do

The response

What counts as a request

Handling it in a client

What to do