what's the difference between API CDN requests per month and api requests per month?

Looking at Sanity's pricing, there's an important distinction between these two types of requests:

API CDN requests get content from Sanity's Content Delivery Network (CDN). The CDN stores a cached version of your content, which means:

• Faster response times since content is served from edge locations
• Slightly delayed updates (typically seconds, but not instant)
• Perfect for public-facing content on your website or app
• Much higher quotas in pricing plans

API requests (non-CDN) query directly against Sanity's API on-demand. These are:

• Always the most current version of your content (real-time)
• Required for authenticated requests
• Necessary when you need the absolute latest data
• Come with lower quotas in pricing plans

In practice, you control which one you use with the useCdn parameter in your Sanity client configuration. For most production websites, you'll want to use the CDN (useCdn: true) since it's faster and more cost-effective. You'd only use direct API requests when you need guaranteed real-time data or are making authenticated queries.

For example, the Growth Plan includes 5M API CDN requests but only 1M API requests per month in its increased quota add-on, showing how Sanity expects most traffic to go through the CDN.

You can read more about this in Sanity's API CDN documentation.