How Do OAuth Quotas Actually Work vs API Tokens?
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Quick question for folks who’ve dug into OAuth vs API key usage a bit deeper 
I understand that API keys have explicit token accounting per model, pricing tiers, context limits, etc.
What I’m less clear on is how OAuth quotas actually behave under the hood.
My current assumption:
* An OAuth “token” isn’t model-specific
* It’s more like a shared usage pool across models
* With possible exceptions or heavier weighting for the top-tier models
But I don’t know if that’s actually true.
Do different models have different token weights when accessed via OAuth?
Or is usage normalized in some way until you hit a hard cap or audit limit?
If anyone can explain how OAuth quotas are really calculated (or has links/docs I may have missed), I’d love to learn. I haven’t seen many people break this down clearly yet.
I understand that API keys have explicit token accounting per model, pricing tiers, context limits, etc.
What I’m less clear on is how OAuth quotas actually behave under the hood.
My current assumption:
* An OAuth “token” isn’t model-specific
* It’s more like a shared usage pool across models
* With possible exceptions or heavier weighting for the top-tier models
But I don’t know if that’s actually true.
Do different models have different token weights when accessed via OAuth?
Or is usage normalized in some way until you hit a hard cap or audit limit?
If anyone can explain how OAuth quotas are really calculated (or has links/docs I may have missed), I’d love to learn. I haven’t seen many people break this down clearly yet.
Solution
Switching from API keys to OAuth affects how you authenticate, but it does not fundamentally change how quotas are counted. Quotas remain strictly model-specific buckets, meaning usage is not normalized or weighted into a single shared pool across different models. An OAuth token acts as a master key to enter the system, but once inside, every model has its own independent occupancy limit. Consequently, maximizing your usage on a lower-tier model has absolutely no impact on your available capacity for a top-tier model. The billing and rate limits are tied to the underlying Project ID, rather than the specific user credentials. If you need to restrict individual users to prevent them from draining a shared project quota, you must build that logic into your application layer, as the OAuth protocol generally does not handle per-user rationing natively.
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