Rate limits
Two limits, and they mean different things.
| Plan | Calls per day | Burst, per minute |
|---|---|---|
| Startup | 5,000 | 60 |
| Scale | 50,000 | 300 |
The daily allowance is the plan. One number, and REST and MCP share it — an MCP
tool call and a GET /posts cost the same one call. It resets 24 hours after your
first call of the day, not at midnight.
The per-minute limit is a guard, not a product feature. It exists so one runaway agent cannot burn a day's allowance in ninety seconds. It sits well above what normal parallel work needs; if you are meeting it regularly, something is looping.
What a 429 looks like
The body says which limit you hit, what it is, and how long to wait — so a client can back off without guessing:
{
"message": "You have hit the burst limit of 60 calls per minute. This is separate from your daily allowance of 5000 calls, which api/v1 and MCP share.",
"code": "rate_limited",
"limit_type": "requests_per_minute",
"limit": 60,
"retry_after_seconds": 12
}
Retry-After is on the response headers too. Honour it rather than picking your own
interval.
402 is not a rate limit
A 402 with code: no_plan means the team has no active subscription.
It looks like a throttle and is not one — retrying will never clear it. This is why the two
are different status codes: an agent that treats "no plan" as "wait and try again" loops
forever.
Using fewer calls
- Raise
limit. One page of 100 costs the same one call as a page of 10. - Search before you fetch. A search result carries enough to decide whether the post is worth a
get. - Poll
/alert-hitsrather than re-running searches. One call returns everything that has matched since your last cursor, however many alerts you have. - Scope with a collection. Narrower results mean fewer pages to walk.
A failed request still counts if it reached us — a 422 from a malformed parameter costs a call, because an agent looping on a bad request costs us the same as one looping on a good one. Our own 429s and 402s do not count.
Usage
Month-to-date usage is on the billing page in the app. Nothing is enforced against that number — what you may actually spend is the daily cap above — it exists so you can see what you are really using.