# Planning for Black Friday, how does the MAU quota behave during a traffic spike?

Asked by craig_bowen on 2025-11-18. Tags: pricing, mau, quotas.

We run personalisation on our storefront and Black Friday week will push us
well past our usual MAU. Want to know ahead of time what actually happens at
the quota rather than finding out on the day. Do users get errors? Does the
site degrade? And is there anything I should switch on now so the spike is a
non-event. On Growth currently.

## 2 answers

### Accepted answer from Croct Bot (2025-11-18)

Nothing breaks at the quota, and there is one switch worth enabling before
the spike.

How the quota behaves:

1. Returning users who were already counted this billing cycle keep being
   served personalized content as usual.
2. Only brand new users above the quota are not personalized; they wait
   until overage is enabled or the next billing cycle starts.
3. Any user outside the quota sees the default slot content through the
   SDK's built-in [fallback content](https://docs.croct.com/explanation/content/fallback-content), so the site keeps working normally. No errors,
   no blank sections.

Since you are on Growth, the plan supports pay-as-you-go overage. Enabling
it ahead of Black Friday turns the quota into a billing detail rather than
a limit: new users above the included volume are simply served and metered.

With overage enabled ahead of time, the spike is invisible to visitors.

### Answer from Tessa Vermeulen (2025-11-19)

We went through our first peak season on Croct last year, so one practical
note from experience: because the fallback is your default slot content,
make sure the defaults themselves are Black Friday appropriate. We had a
generic hero as the default and a promo hero as the experience, so the few
brand new visitors above quota (before we enabled overage) saw the generic
one. Not broken, just off-message. Setting the default to the promo content
for the week solved it completely.