API Rate Limits: Best Practices for Reliability and Speed

Rate limits protect the platform and your users. Here’s how to design clients that feel instant and never fail noisily.

Understand the limits

• Minute and daily limits are enforced per API key
• Premium tiers raise ceilings; see Docs → Rate Limits

Strategies that work

1. Client-side caching for identical GETs (5–60s)
2. Queued background jobs for bulk work
3. Retry with exponential backoff on 429
4. Use ETags/If-None-Match when available

JavaScript retry helper

async function call(url, options, retries = 3){
  for (let i=0; i<retries; i++){
    const res = await fetch(url, options)
    if (res.status === 429){
      const wait = (+res.headers.get('Retry-After') || Math.pow(2,i)) * 1000
      await new Promise(r=>setTimeout(r, wait))
      continue
    }
    if (!res.ok) throw new Error((await res.json()).message)
    return res.json()
  }
}

FAQ

What should my default retry policy be?

3 tries with 1s, 2s, 4s backoff is a good baseline. Respect Retry-After when present.

How do I avoid thrashing?

Batch non-urgent calls and switch to background queues; cache success responses.