Design an API Quota Service

Design the platform service that meters and enforces per-customer API usage quotas for a large multi-tenant SaaS (for example, a plan that grants 5 million API calls per billing month). Unlike a per-second rate limiter, this service tracks cumulative consumption against a period budget, drives both soft warnings and hard cut-offs, and feeds billing — so its counts must be accurate enough to charge money against.

Operating context. Every tenant belongs to a plan tier with a monthly quota; some endpoints cost more than one unit per call. The enforcement check sits inline on the request path across a global fleet of gateway nodes, so the added latency must be tiny. Counters roll over at each tenant's billing anchor, which may sit in a different timezone. Usage must ultimately reconcile with the invoicing system to the unit.

Out of scope. Per-second burst throttling (a separate rate limiter owns that), the billing and invoicing system itself, plan/pricing configuration UI, and fraud or abuse detection. Assume other teams own those.

What to produce. A high-level architecture covering: the inline check path and how it stays fast, how usage is counted and aggregated across many gateway nodes without a global lock, the storage and partitioning of counters, how you trade freshness against throughput (local pre-aggregation, sync interval, and the resulting over-shoot window), how billing-period resets are handled per tenant, how the service degrades when the counter store is unreachable, and how counts reconcile with billing. Sketch the components and the flow between them; we will probe specifics in checkpoints.