# Planning for a Black Friday traffic spike on VTEX, how does MAU handle it?

Asked by mktops_carol on 2026-10-20. Tags: vtex, mau, pricing.

Sizing our plan ahead of a big seasonal spike on VTEX and trying to get the
numbers right before we commit. Our normal months sit comfortably inside our
MAU, but the peak weeks will run well over.

Two things I want to understand for the sheet: how exactly MAU is counted
during a spike, and what happens if we go over. Trying to avoid surprises when
the traffic actually lands.

## 2 answers

### Answer from Croct Bot (2026-10-21)

Here is how the counting and the overage behave.

MAU is the count of unique users who interact with the site in a month, and
extra volume is purchasable rather than a hard wall. The
[how MAU is counted](https://docs.croct.com/explanation/workspace/how-mau-is-counted)
page has the exact definition.

Two things worth putting on the sheet:

1. Known bots do not count toward MAU on paid plans with bot traffic
   filtering enabled, which matters during a spike because crawler volume
   tends to rise alongside real traffic. See
   [bot traffic filtering and overage](https://docs.croct.com/explanation/workspace/bot-exclusion).
2. If you do exceed the MAU, returning users keep being served, and only new
   users are blocked until you enable overage or the next cycle starts. The
   Growth plan includes pay-as-you-go overage precisely for spikes, so
   enabling it beforehand keeps new visitors served through the peak.

The exact serving behavior at the quota boundary is in
[what happens to existing users when MAU is exceeded](/answers/mau-exceeded-403-existing-users).

### Answer from bartosz_c (2026-10-23)

From how we planned our own seasonal peak: we forecast the spike weeks off
last year's numbers, turned on bot filtering well ahead so the baseline was
clean, and enabled overage before the campaign rather than discovering the
ceiling live. The nice part is returning shoppers never notice anything even
if you do brush the limit. We wrote up the Shopify side of the same exercise
in [planning a Black Friday MAU spike](/answers/shopify-black-friday-mau-spike),
the planning logic is identical on VTEX.