Here you can find how we measure consumption depending on each one of our services.

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Group quota is shared between all group members. This means that for premium services, each individual user consumption is subtracted from the group quota. Therefore, it will be reflected in both the user and their group consumptions.

Summary table:


SERVICE / QUOTA CONSUMPTION	Searches / Downloads	API requests	Livehunt	Retrohunt	Private Graphs
VTAPI	When VTI available but not Premium API	X
VTI	X
Livehunt		If using Livehunt API endpoints	X
Retrohunt		If using Retrohunt API endpoints		X
Graph		When loading public graphs			X

VTAPI

*Minute, daily and monthly limitations. E.g. requests/day

Quota consumption API details

API v2

*API version 3 is now the default and encouraged way to programmatically interact with VirusTotal. While older API endpoints are still available and will not be deprecated, we encourage you to migrate your workloads to this new version.

Usually one API call consumes one request from your quota. However, there are some exceptions:

Multihash searches: You can make a request to /vtapi/v2/file/report, that admits a list of hashes as a parameter. This way you will save time, but it will count as one request per hash in the list.
Information about file uploads: Our /vtapi/v2/file/submissions endpoint lets you obtain information about uploads for one or more files. It will count as one request per each submission returned for each one of the files. This means that if file1.txt has been uploaded to VT 4 times and file2.txt has been uploaded to VT 6 times, you will consume 10 requests from your group quota.
New file uploads: If you upload a new file to VirusTotal via /file/scan it won't consume from your quota. This means that you can freely upload new files not found in VirusTotal without consuming from your API quota. Notice that after uploading those files you usually would want to check the file analysis via /file/report, and doing this does consume from your quota.

Link to our APIv2 documentation

API v3

Usually one API call consumes one request from your quota. However, there are some exceptions:

Enterprise searches (only for users with VTI and without VTAPI): If you have Intelligence quota and you don't have premium API, the requests to VTI premium endpoints ("VT Enterprise Endpoints" section) are taken from your VTI quota. If you have VTAPI, these searches will consume quota from your API limits, as usual
Checking consumption and quota details: For example using /users/{id}/overall_quotas and /users/{id}/api_usage endpoints for checking your API quotas and usage. No quota consumption.
Feeds:No quota consumption for feeds endpoints. This includes file downloads using links provided by feeds endpoints.
File uploading: If a user uploads a new file that is not in VirusTotal, then no API quota will be consumed. Further calls to retrieve this file's data (GET/files/{sha256}) won't consume quota either. Note that re-scanning the file (POST/files/{sha256}/analyse) will consume quota as any other API call.

Link to our APIv3 documentation

VTI

*Monthly limitation. E.g. downloads/month

Quota consumption VTI details

VTI Quota can be consumed in 2 ways:

Via website (multihash search or not). A direct search, pivoting to another search or if you use pagination. This consumes only 1 search from Intelligence.
Via APIv3. If you don't have premium VTAPI but you have premium VTI it consumes 1 search/request from Intelligence. If you use the cursor to iterate over the results, it also consumes 1 req/request.

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If you use VT Enterprise via API with our VT Enterprise endpoints, quota will be consumed from Premium API (if purchased) or from VT Enterprise (if no API purchased)

VTHunting

*Monthly limitation. E.g. rules/month

Quota consumption VTHunting details

Livehunt

Each YARA rule you create consumes 1 rule from your quota, except for inactive rulesets. This means that if you have 3 rules in 1 active ruleset, you consume 3 YARA rules.

Retrohunt

Each retrohunt job you create consumes 1 job from your quota, no exceptions. This means that it doesn't matter if your job was successful or not or whether it had matches or not.

VTGraph

*Monthly limitation. Private graphs/month

Quota consumption Graph details

Premium

VTGraph service only consumes from graph quota when creating private graphs.

If you create a private graph, it will consume 1 graph from your quota. No other consumption will be applied.

Public

However, if you create a public graph, it will consume from your API quota as per the requests to the API that have been necessary in order to load all items in the graph. The more items you try to load, the more requests to API and therefore the more API quota consumption.