Contentful’s usage limits page states that it forms an integral part of the agreement between the customer and Contentful, and that a customer who does not agree with it should not use the services.[1] It sets out two layers of limits. The first layer is commercial: quotas of API calls and asset bandwidth, with overage rules that differ by plan, plus quotas for newer features. The second layer is technical: ceilings that protect the shared infrastructure, published in the developer documentation. This article describes both and explains how they interact with the Service Order.
Which limits apply
The usage limits apply to current plans: Free and Lite, launched on 18 November 2024, and Premium, launched on 1 February 2023. Legacy plans are governed by a legacy usage limit, and the page states that if a Service Order contains different limits, the Service Order takes precedence.[1] The technical limits page makes the same point from the other direction: where plan or space entitlements are less than the technical limits, the customer is subject to the plan or space entitlement limits.[2] The practical rule is that the lowest applicable number governs.
API calls
Definition and counting
The utility limit is “Total API calls (CMA, CPA, CDA)” per month, covering the Content Management, Content Preview and Content Delivery APIs.[1] The technical limits table lists GraphQL calls with the Content Delivery API.[2] The Lite section notes that cached CDN responses do not generate additional API calls, so cache hit rates affect cost.[1]
Quotas and overage by plan
On the Free plan the quota is 100,000 calls per month and additional consumption is not allowed.[1] On the Lite plan it is 1,000,000 calls per month; an additional Lite space brings a further 2,000,000 calls per month per space.[1] Extra Lite calls are billed at USD or EUR 5 per 1,000,000 calls monthly, fees apply per starting quota, and Contentful sets no cap on extra calls. The page illustrates that 50 million additional calls would cost roughly USD or EUR 250 per month.[1] Premium and Enterprise plans do not accrue API-call overages and are bound by the technical limits; the page says pricing on those plans generally scales with the number and complexity of use cases rather than delivery volume.[1]
The pricing page presents the same position: Free 100K per month with no overages, Lite 1M plus any Lite space allowance with paid overages allowed, and Enterprise “Waived, no costs”.[3] Overage on any plan is possible only if the organization has a valid credit card or other accepted payment method on record.[1]
Rate limits
The technical limits set per-second ceilings per space: Content Delivery API 55 calls per second on Free plans and 78 on paid plans, Content Management API 7 and 10, and Content Preview API 14 and 20.[2] Plans that use dedicated infrastructure can customize rate limits for the organization.[2] Automation action steps are effectively API calls and consume the space’s rate limit.[1]
Asset bandwidth
Asset bandwidth is the total data used when assets such as images, videos and documents are downloaded in a billing period, including data served through Contentful’s content delivery networks.[4] It is measured monthly from the day the contract was signed, so a contract signed on the 15th runs from the 15th to the 14th, and usage resets to zero at the start of each period.[4]
Quotas are 50 GB (Free), 100 GB (Lite), 10,000 GB (Premium) and 40,000 GB (Enterprise) per month, with additional allowances per space: 750 GB for a Lite space, and for Premium and Enterprise plans 0, 750, 2,000 and 100 GB per month for Starter, Standard, Enterprise and Templated spaces respectively.[1] Contentful states that it does not cap the asset bandwidth an organization can consume; usage above the included amount results in overage charges.[1][4] Lite overage is USD or EUR 0.15 per GB. The pricing page shows Enterprise bandwidth as custom with paid overages.[1][3]
The Free plan behaves differently. Once the 50 GB limit is reached, the delivery APIs (CDA, GraphQL and CPA) are blocked until the end of the month or until the plan is upgraded, so new content including assets cannot be delivered.[4] Customers can see current usage, remaining days in the period and a list of top assets in the web app, and alerts are emailed to organization owners or admins at 50%, 75%, 85% and 100% of the included amount.[4]
Feature quotas on larger plans
Functions
Premium and Enterprise plans include Functions executions of 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 per month respectively. Executions by Marketplace Apps do not count against the limits or accrue overage, and further use is charged monthly in arrears at the rates in the Service Order.[1] A soft-limits period from 31 March 2025 to 1 August 2025 let customers use Functions without overage charges or add-ons after general availability.[1] The technical limits add ceilings of 20,000,000 executions per organization per month, execution time of 30 seconds and 128 MB of memory per function.[2]
AI Actions
Premium and Enterprise plans include an annual quota of AI Consumption Units, 750 for Premium and 1,500 for Enterprise, reset at the start of each annual usage period; for a customer who signed on 15 January 2025 the period runs to 14 January 2026. Additional usage is charged monthly in arrears at Service Order rates.[1] The pricing page lists AI Actions as an add-on to Enterprise plans with quotas included across Enterprise plans.[3]
Automations
Automation executions are limited to 650 per organization within 24 hours on the Pro plan and 2000 on Premium plans.[1] The page does not define the Pro plan further; it is not among the current plans listed on the pricing page.
Contentful Personalization
Personalization is sized in MAPs, a term that the usage limits page does not define. Under each of the Start, Core and Scale tiers, the number of total Experience API calls per month can be up to ten times the MAPs purchased, and each tier includes a quota of AI Audience Suggestions, AI Experience Suggestions and AI Variant Generation: up to 100 for Start, 500 per month for Core and 1000 per month for Scale.[1] The technical limits add 25 conversion metrics per Personalization environment and a profile size of 16 KB.[2]
Technical limits
The technical limits table covers a long list of structural ceilings. Examples include 50 fields per content type, 2 MB per entry, 1 MB request size, 7 MB response size, 1,000 MB per asset on paid plans (50 MB on Free), 100 API keys per organization on Free and Lite and 200 on other paid plans, 20 webhooks per space on Free and Lite and 100 on other paid plans, and 12 environment creations per five minutes.[2] Spaces per organization are capped at 1 for Free, 2 for Lite and 750 for other paid plans.[2] Contentful reserves the right to take corrective action when limits are exceeded, including throttling the API, temporarily suspending or, when other options are unavailable, terminating the account.[2] It also reserves throttling for short periods when system stability is at risk regardless of plan.[1]
Compliance implications
Overage is invoiced rather than audited. For the Free plan the control is a hard stop, for Lite it is a linear and modelable charge, and for Premium and Enterprise the controls are the bandwidth quota and technical limits. Useful steps for a SAM team are to export the monthly bandwidth figure from the web app against the contract period, to set the usage alerts to reach a shared mailbox, to compare each space type’s bandwidth allowance with the licences actually held, and to check whether a Service Order overrides any of the figures above.
Out of scope
Legacy usage limits, regional or dedicated infrastructure rate-limit customization, and prices in a Service Order are outside this article. The Pro plan appears in the automations table only and is not described elsewhere in the sources reviewed.