Free model quotas have a hidden enemy: synchronous calls. Every request blocks on the network. Timeouts get wasted. Retries pile up.
Core conclusion: an asynchronous queue turns a free model quota from a demo tool into a batch engine. A SQLite-backed queue, a few Python workers, and a dead-letter table can extract ten times the throughput of synchronous code.
The sync trap
Synchronous calls look simple. Send a request, wait for a response, process the result. The problem is the waiting.
A 30-second timeout means 30 seconds of idle. Ten concurrent requests mean ten threads waiting. Free endpoints get slow, so your threads wait longer. Soon your application becomes a queueing system without the reliability of a queue.
