Retrieve usage information within the current billing period together with the corresponding account limits. For Pro API users, the /usageendpoint returns the following:

  • Text and document translation characters consumed in the current billing period in total and for the API key used to make the request
  • Text improvement (/write) characters consumed in the current billing period in total and for the API key used to make the request
  • Total characters consumed in the current billing period by the API key used to make the request
  • The key-level character limit for the API key used to make the request, if applicable (if a key-level usage limit is set, it will be reflected in the api_key_character_limit field in the response; 1000000000000 will be returned if no key-level limit is set)
  • The current billing period start timestamp
  • The current billing period end timestamp
  • Total characters consumed in the current billing period
  • Subscription-level character limit that applies to the current billing period (if Cost Control is set, it will be reflected in the character_limit field in the response; 1000000000000 will be returned if no limit is set)

An example request and response is shown below.

Note that responses for Free API and Pro Classic users only contain character_count and character_limit.

The value in the character_countfield includes both text and document translations as well as text improvement (DeepL API for Write) characters. Characters are counted based on the source text length in Unicode code points, so for example “A”, “Δ”, “あ”, and “深” are each counted as a single character.

We also provide a spec that is auto-generated from DeepL’s OpenAPI file. You can find it here.

The example below uses our API Pro endpoint https://api.deepl.com. If you’re an API Free user, remember to update your requests to use https://api-free.deepl.com instead.

Example request: check usage and limits
curl -X GET 'https://api.deepl.com/v2/usage' \
--header 'Authorization: DeepL-Auth-Key [yourAuthKey]'
Example response
{
    "products": [
        {
            "product_type": "write",
            "api_key_character_count": 1000000,
            "character_count": 1250000
        },
        {
            "product_type": "translate",
            "api_key_character_count": 880000,
            "character_count": 900000
        }
    ],
    "api_key_character_count": 1880000,
    "api_key_character_limit": 0,
    "start_time": "2025-04-24T14:58:02Z",
    "end_time": "2025-05-24T14:58:02Z",
    "character_count": 2150000,
    "character_limit": 20000000
}

If you are looking for general API limitations, please see here.