We wanted to base our pricing on usage instead of number of users, data sources or accounts. And the way to measure the usage of the tool is by API calls, that is why our plans are limited by the daily API calls done. But, what is an API call?

API calls in Google Sheets

An API call is everytime our add-on needs to “call” the data source chosen (Facebook, Google Analytics, Criteo…) to bring data into your spreadsheet. Therefore, everytime you make a query or refresh it, you are consuming 1 API call, no matter how many accounts, metrics or dimensions you have selected.

For example, if you have a spreadsheet with 3 queries of different data sources like Facebook, Google Ads and Instagram and it is set up to automatically refresh twice a day, it will make 6 API calls daily.

What happens when you get an error trying to make or refresh a query? Then, since the call couldn’t be done successfully, no API call is consumed.

You can also check how many API calls you are consuming, as well as your daily limit, at the bottom of the add-on:

On the following link, you can learn how we count API calls in Data Studio.