This is more of a clarifying question than anything, but are YouTube's Data API quotas applied at the project level, even when the API requests are made with user access tokens? Our application authenticates users with Google and passes the access tokens from that OAuth process to the YouTube API for each request. However, it looks like the quota is aggregating calls across all users and caping our usage when the total usage hits our quota.
We assumed that the YouTube Data API quotas behaved similarly to Twitch's API rate limits:
...instead of relying on an app access token that has a set rate limit, consider using a user access token in which case each user of your application is given a rate limit allowing your development to scale as your users increase
Is this not the case for YouTube's Data API? If not, is the only path forward requesting a higher quota limit? Is there a service tier that allows us to "pay as we use" the YouTube Data API to mitigate the risk of hitting our quota and affecting our users' access to data from the API?