How to fix Open AI API `insufficient_quota` Error

Date: 2024-09-25 | create | tech | open-ai | fullstack-projects |

I'm using Open AI's API to generate project descriptions for FullstackProjects. I recently ran into an insufficient_quota error which blocked my generation process.

Here we'll discuss what this error message means and how I fixed it.

insufficient_quota Error

During my generation I noticed I was getting errors. On further inspection it was an error of type insufficient_quota. Response payload:

"error": {
    "message": "You exceeded your current quota, please check your plan and billing details. For more information on this error, read the docs: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/error-codes/api-errors.";,

    "type": "insufficient_quota",
    "param": null,
    "code": "insufficient_quota"
}

The insufficient_quota error essentially means you've exceeded your account limits. The most common causes of this are:

  • Running out of credits
  • Going over rate limits

How to fix insufficient_quota error

The first thing you should do is check that you have credits in your account. You can do this by:

  • Go to Open AI Website
  • Navigate to your Profile
  • Go to Billing tab
  • Check Credit balance > $0

In my case I'd run out of credits so I needed to buy more. Unfortunately this did not resolve my issue right away - I had to wait ~4 hours for the new credits to be respected by the API so my generation could continue.

If you do have credits available then you might be going over your rate limits. You can find your account's rate limits (they change based on your usage tier) by going to:

  • Open AI Website
  • Go to your Profile
  • Go to Limits tab
  • Find your limits based on the model you're using

If in doubt - consider temporarily lowering your generation so you know for sure you're not exceeding limits. For example - I reduced my generation to 1 per minute while I debugged my quota errors.

Next

I'm still generating a bunch of project descriptions for FullstackProjects and will probably write a post about my learnings when that's complete so stay tuned for that.

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