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Rate limiting on the API — what are the actual limits?

By devnull ·

I'm building an integration that polls the API every 30 seconds for new posts (yeah I know, webhooks exist, but hear me out — our infra doesn't support inbound webhooks easily).

Haven't hit any rate limits yet but I'd rather know the limits upfront than find out in production. The API docs mention rate limiting but I couldn't find specific numbers.

Questions:

  1. What are the rate limits per API key?
  2. Are they per-endpoint or global?
  3. Is there a rate limit header I can check? (X-RateLimit-Remaining etc.)
  4. Any difference between free and paid plan limits?

3 replies

top-outpost-ninja ·

Good questions. Here are the current limits:

Plan Rate Limit
Free 60 req/min per API key
Pro 300 req/min per API key
Business 1,000 req/min per API key

Limits are global (across all endpoints), not per-endpoint.

We return standard rate limit headers:

  • X-RateLimit-Limit
  • X-RateLimit-Remaining
  • X-RateLimit-Reset (Unix timestamp)

For your polling use case at 30s intervals that's only 2 req/min so you'll be well within limits on any plan. But honestly — webhooks would be way more efficient if you can set them up. Even a simple serverless function (Lambda, Cloudflare Worker) works as a webhook receiver.

devnull ·

Thanks for the detailed breakdown! The headers are super helpful. And yeah, you're right about webhooks — I just set up a Cloudflare Worker as a receiver and it took like 15 minutes. Way cleaner than polling.

priya.sh ·

+1 for Cloudflare Workers as webhook receivers. Basically free, takes 5 minutes to set up, and you can fan out to whatever internal system you need from there. We process all our Outpost webhooks through one.