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Autumn’s SDKs include a fail-open mechanism that prevents your application from going down if Autumn is temporarily unreachable. When enabled, critical SDK methods return safe default responses instead of throwing errors.

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Why fail-open?

As a billing engine, Autumn sits in the critical path of your application. If your app calls check() to gate access to a feature, and Autumn is unreachable, that call would throw an error — effectively blocking your users from accessing your product. Fail-open ensures your users are never blocked by an Autumn outage. Usage events may be lost during the outage, but your customers stay unaffected. If you run the edge cache, checks keep working through an outage, answered from the last balances Autumn sent it.

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Behavior

Fail-open is enabled by default. When Autumn is unreachable (network errors, timeouts, or server errors returning 5XX status codes), the SDK returns safe defaults: Customer and entity operations, including customers.getOrCreate(), customers.get(), entities.get(), and entities.create(), propagate errors even when fail-open is enabled. Only check() and track() return fail-open defaults.
When fail-open triggers, the SDK logs a prominent error to your console so you’re immediately aware of the issue.

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When fail-open triggers

Fail-open activates when the SDK encounters:
  • Server errors — Autumn returns a 5XX status code (500, 502, 503, etc.)
  • Network failures — DNS resolution failure, connection refused, connection reset
  • Timeouts — The request to Autumn times out
Fail-open does not activate for client errors (4XX). If you receive a 400 (bad request), 401 (unauthorized), or 404 (not found), those errors propagate normally since they indicate a problem with your integration, not an Autumn outage.

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Configuration

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Disabling fail-open

If you prefer strict error handling and want all Autumn errors to propagate:

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Detecting fail-open responses

When check() fails open, the response will have allowed: true with empty values:

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Console output

When fail-open triggers, you’ll see this in your server logs:
Monitor your logs for this message. If you see it, check status.useautumn.com for ongoing incidents.

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SDK support