Expecting a 3x traffic month from a TV spot, upgrade or buy extra volume?
We are on Growth and a TV campaign airs next month. Media agency projects roughly 60k MAU for that single month, then back to our normal 18-20k after.
What is the sane play here: enable pay-as-you-go overage, temporarily upgrade, or start a Scale conversation? I do not want to resize our whole plan around one campaign month, but I also need to know what happens to visitors if we get the forecast wrong and blow past the quota with nothing enabled
1 answer
For a one-off spike month, pay-as-you-go overage is the intended mechanism. It is included in the Growth plan precisely so you can absorb campaign peaks as billable extra volume instead of resizing the plan around a single month. Enable it before the campaign airs and the traffic beyond your included 20k MAU is simply billed as overage.
To answer the failure-mode question directly: if overage is off when you exceed the quota, the API returns 403 for new users only. Returning users continue to be served normally until overage is enabled or the next billing cycle starts. And because the SDKs always render fallbacks when a fetch fails, blocked new users see your default content. The site keeps working; those visitors are un-personalized, not broken.
When to think about Scale instead: if the campaign is expected to permanently lift your baseline, sustained volume around 60k MAU is Scale territory, since that tier offers custom MAU, slots, and experiment quotas. For a single TV month with a return to 18-20k, overage is the right tool.