A hard platform quota is a backstop for disasters, so set it above normal use

A hard quota on a platform is not a gentle usage cap. When it runs out, the platform decides what your users see, and it is rarely something you would choose.

An early plan for the CCRTA website set Google's daily Maps quota to about 3,000 loads, against roughly 7,500 a day at the time, concentrated in service hours. That cap would have run out before midday every day. Exhausting it does not quietly disable the map: Google renders a darkened map with a "for development purposes only" watermark until midnight Pacific time. Riders would have seen that every afternoon.

The revised design layers two limits. Google's daily quota is set to 15,000, above the observed peak, as a ceiling for disasters only. Below it, an in-app daily budget in Redis is tuned lower, so when traffic is unusual riders see a clean cached static map long before the hard quota is anywhere near.

We also learned where to look. Google's public usage-and-billing page documents only per-minute quotas, but the Cloud Console lists a "Map loads per day" quota. The console was the authority.

The general rule: put your own graceful degradation below any hard platform quota, and set the hard quota above normal usage, never near it.

Receipt: CCRTA Website commit f7b2341 (docs/superpowers/specs/2026-07-25-google-maps-cost-reduction-design.md, Layer 0; FINDINGS.md, "Google Maps / cost").