Rate limits and admission

CHEESE Credits are account-wide, not per key. Every successful synchronous search, sample, or selection execution costs one credit, and every successful durable-run item costs one credit. The same daily balance is shared by all API keys, browser traffic, the legacy API at api.cheese.deepmedchem.com, and API v2 at api.deepmedchem.com. Catalog, validation, estimation, run polling, and result retrieval are free. Failed or timed-out execution is refunded.

During the September 2026 promotion, registered and paid tiers receive 10× their normal daily allowance through October 1 at 00:00 UTC. The multiplier applies to the shared account balance, so creating another key or switching API surfaces does not create another allowance.

Synchronous computation has a hard 10-second limit. A 504 synchronous_timeout means computation was terminated; submit the same selection to /api/v2/runs. Each basic durable-run item has a 60-second execution limit. Durable runs also bound active runs, queued items, body bytes, work units, result cells/bytes, and model calls; the catalog advertises effective capacity limits.

A 429 means no work was admitted and includes Retry-After. A 413 durable_required from /selections means the scientific request is valid but belongs in /runs; reuse the returned run payload. Do not split or parallelize requests to evade admission controls.