Health and Billing

Every changelog source has a health status: ok, degraded, or problematic.

Health States

• ok: Source is fetching successfully. Counts toward your plan limit.
• degraded: Temporary fetch failures (network issues, vendor downtime). Does not count toward your plan limit.
• problematic: Persistent failures (structure changed, feed deleted, adapter broken). Does not count toward your plan limit.

Billing Policy

A degraded or problematic source does not consume a free or paid slot, and the customer is not charged for it.

This means:

• Free plan (3 sources): If one of your sources becomes degraded, you still have access to it, and it does not eat one of your 3 slots. You can add a fourth healthy source.
• All plan (unlimited): Degraded sources are available but do not affect billing.

Only sources with health: "ok" are billable.

Example

You subscribe to:

• aws.whats-new (ok)
• vercel.changelog (ok)
• shopify-api-updates (degraded)

On the Free plan (3 sources):

• You are using 2 billable slots (aws, vercel)
• shopify-api-updates does not count
• You can add 1 more healthy source

The helper function billableSource(health) in lib/changelog/billing.ts returns false for degraded or problematic sources.

Plan Gates

The entries API enforces plan limits by counting only billable sources. When you request entries for ?sources=aws.whats-new,vercel.changelog,shopify-api-updates:

• 2 billable sources (aws, vercel)
• 1 non-billable source (shopify)
• Free plan allows this request (2 billable, under the 3-source limit)

Degraded Sources on the Site

Source detail pages show a “Being investigated by the team” badge for degraded sources. The source is deprioritized in the catalog sort.

Customers can still read entries from degraded sources via the API, but we make it clear the source is not healthy.

Next

Explore the Use Cases to see how teams use Watch Changelog for GTM, SE renewals, and agent workflows.