Tiers & quotas

Blockchain Academics ships one product, the Crypto Brain with its 105 tools, across five access tiers: Free, Starter, Pro, Team and Enterprise. The tool surface is the same at every tier. What changes is the monthly quota, the rate limit, which tools return data instead of BCA_TIER_LOCKED, how far back history goes, and whether strip_attribution is honored.

Quick reference

Tier	Agent-backed tools	`as_of` queries	`strip_attribution`	Seats
Free	No	No	No	1
Starter	No	No	No	1
Pro	Yes, with a daily job cap	Yes	Yes	1
Team	Yes, with a higher daily cap	Yes	Yes	5 included
Enterprise	Yes, negotiated	Yes	Yes, white-label available	Negotiated

Every tier has a monthly call quota and a per-second rate limit, and both grow with the plan. The free tier has no card and no time limit.

Tool gating

Most tools are available at every tier. Gating happens per tool: a call above your tier returns HTTP 403 with BCA_TIER_LOCKED rather than a thinner payload. The minimum tier per category, read from the same catalog the tool reference is built from:

Category	Tools	Minimum tier	Gated above the minimum
Content & corpus	7	Free	`get_as_of_snapshot` (Enterprise)
Market data	4	Free	`get_ohlc` (Starter), `get_pair_data` (Starter)
On-chain	4	Free	`get_wallet_profile` (Starter), `get_tx` (Starter), `get_token_holders` (Pro)
Sentiment + crypto Twitter	6	Free	`get_social_pulse` (Pro), `get_ct_pulse` (Pro), `get_x_signals` (Pro), `get_kol_consensus` (Pro)
Proprietary indicators	6	Starter	`get_coverage_index` (Pro), `get_narrative_strength` (Pro), `get_sentiment_velocity` (Pro), `get_editorial_premium` (Pro), `get_kol_influence` (Pro)
Agent-backed generation (async)	6	Free	`generate_due_diligence` (Pro), `generate_tokenomics_model` (Pro), `summarize_whitepaper` (Pro), `translate_contract` (Pro), `monitor_keyword` (Pro)
Directories	16	Free	None
Fundamentals	6	Free	`get_tokenomics` (Starter)
Chain-specific	4	Free	None
Microstructure	5	Free	None
Narrative / meta	5	Free	None
Regulatory	4	Starter	None
Security	4	Free	None
Memes / degen	4	Free	None
Compute / AI crypto	2	Free	None
Services (revenue)	3	Free	None
History time-series	4	Free	None
Corpus meta	7	Free	None
Memos / theses / social / currencies	8	Free	None

When a caller hits a tool above their tier, the server returns HTTP 403 with an error body: { "error": { "code": "BCA_TIER_LOCKED", "message": "Tool requires pro tier.", "request_id": "req_…" } }. Agents catch the 403, read error.code and surface the upgrade path.

Attribution by tier

Tier	Attribution rule
Free	`cite_url` surfaced verbatim. Stripping gets the key rate-limited first.
Starter	Same as Free.
Pro	`cite_url` recommended. `strip_attribution: true` honored on applicable read tools.
Team	Same as Pro. The dashboard shows per-seat citation compliance.
Enterprise	Full white-label; `cite_url` may be replaced with a contract-approved scheme.

See Attribution & licensing for what "verbatim" means in practice.

Getting a key

Sign up at blockchainacademics.com/crypto-api/signup: free, by email, no card.
The key (bca_live_…) arrives by email and is on your dashboard.
Drop it into BCA_API_KEY in your MCP config or shell.
For a paid plan, pick one on Pricing: the same key moves up on the first successful charge.

Rate-limit response

Over-limit calls return HTTP 429 with a JSON body the MCP server surfaces as a structured error:

json

{
  "error": {
    "code": "BCA_RATE_LIMIT",
    "message": "Rate limit exceeded on the Free tier. Retry-After: 8s.",
    "retry_after_seconds": 8
  }
}

The bundled HTTP client honors Retry-After. Custom clients: sleep the indicated seconds and retry, or upgrade.

Attribution & licensing: the contractual side of the cite_url rule.
Response envelope: envelope fields including the meta.status enum (complete | unseeded | partial | stale).
Tool reference: the tier chip on every tool.