Introduction

A consumption pool is a shared quota of consumption units that belongs to a customer account. Rather than assigning each license or product feature its own independent budget, you link them to a pool and they all draw from the same balance.

A typical use case is an enterprise customer purchasing a large block of API calls to distribute across all of their licenses, or multiple products sharing a single bucket of AI credits.

Consumption Pools are available on the Enterprise plan. If the Consumption pools tab is not visible on your customer accounts, contact LicenseSpring support to enable the feature.

Pool Types

Every pool has a type, which is set at creation and cannot be changed:

• Licenses: consumption-type licenses belonging to the owning customer account can be linked as members.
• Product features: consumption-type product features on that account's licenses can be linked.

A pool can only contain one kind of member. Linking a license to a feature-typed pool, or a feature to a license-typed pool, is rejected by the API with invalid_pool_type. A pool can only contain members that belong to its own customer account.

How Metering Works

When a pooled license or feature consumes, two counters increase at the same time:

• The member's own total_consumptions tracking that member's individual contribution to the pool.
• The pool's total_consumptions the shared running balance across all members.

The member's counter is not redundant. It is how you see which licenses or features are spending the pool's quota, and it drives the per-member breakdown in usage reports.

Two Caps, Both Enforced

Being part of a pool does not replace the member's own limit — both apply, and the request fails on whichever is reached first:

• The member's own max_consumptions, unless the member has unlimited consumptions enabled.
• The pool's quota max_consumptions extended by max_overages when overages are allowed.

If a member has unlimited consumptions, only the pool cap applies to that member.

Governed Settings

While a license or feature is linked to a pool, certain behavioral settings are inherited from the pool rather than the member. The member's own values for these settings are ignored while it remains pooled:

Setting	While pooled, source
max_consumptions	Both the member and the pool (both enforced)
allow_unlimited_consumptions	The member (for its own cap) / the pool (for the pool cap)
allow_overages, max_overages	The pool
allow_negative_consumptions	The pool
reset_consumption, consumption_period	The pool

Overages, Negatives, and Unlimited

Overages with allow_overages enabled, the pool accepts consumption past max_consumptions, up to max_consumptions + max_overages.

Unlimited overages: enabling allow_overages with max_overages set to 0 removes the upper limit on overages entirely.

max_overages = 0 with overages allowed means unlimited overages, not zero overages allowed. To forbid overages entirely, disable allow_overages.

Negative consumptions enabled by default. A negative amount reduces the pool balance; the total never drops below zero.

Unlimited pools with allow_unlimited_consumptions enabled, the pool has no cap at all.

Pool Status

The platform derives a status from the pool's current counters:

Status	Meaning
Active	Consumption is below the pool maximum
In overage	Consumption has exceeded the maximum but remains within the overage allowance
Depleted	The full quota, including any overage allowance, has been used. Member consumption requests are rejected.
Unlimited	The pool has no cap

When a pool is depleted, consumption calls on any of its members fail with pool_quota_exhausted. See Consuming from a Pool for the full error response.

What Happens if the Feature is Disabled

If Consumption Pools is later removed from your plan, pools and their management UI become unavailable. However, your historical consumption data remains accessible through the analytics endpoints of the Management API, you retain API access to data generated while the feature was active.

Glossary

Term	Meaning
Pool	A shared consumption quota owned by one customer account
Member	A license or product feature linked to a pool
Contribution	A member's own total_consumptions while pooled
Held (offline)	Units reserved from the pool by devices that activated offline and have not yet synced
Checkout	The reservation record created when a device offline-activates a pooled license