Rate limits

Every REST response carries its quota state in the standard RateLimit header fields. Read them on the responses you already receive and pace against them.

Response headers

RateLimit-Policy is present on every response, including 4xx and 5xx. RateLimit is present on every credentialed response.

The widely-deployed RateLimit-Limit, RateLimit-Remaining, and RateLimit-Reset headers are sent alongside them, carrying the same numbers.

t and RateLimit-Reset are a number of seconds from now.

Quotas

The reported allowance is a floor: the API runs across several instances and each counts its own window, so the aggregate allowance is at least what the header reports. A client that paces against the header stays inside the quota.

The key policy is the one that answers 429 below, and the only one that reports a running RateLimit. An anonymous request receives RateLimit-Policy alone: its traffic is counted at the network edge, which sees the real client address, so a per-request remaining count here would always read full.

When you exceed the limit

A request over the allowance returns 429 with Retry-After and the standard error envelope:

HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Retry-After: 23
RateLimit-Policy: "key";q=600;w=60
RateLimit: "key";r=0;t=23
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "error": {
    "code": "RATE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED",
    "message": "Rate limit exceeded. Retry after the number of seconds in Retry-After."
  }
}

Full definition of the code: RATE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED.

Pacing an integration

• Wait the number of seconds in Retry-After. It is exact.
• Slow down as r falls. Below roughly 10% of the policy's q, spread the rest of your calls over t seconds.
• Back off exponentially on repeated 429s, with jitter so parallel workers retry at different moments.
• Batch instead of looping. Tagging, untagging, transferring, and deleting each accept many asset ids per call, which costs one unit of quota.
• Poll at an interval. Upload processing continues after the response; re-fetch the asset every few seconds rather than continuously.