Rate limits and quotas

Two limits apply to your key: a rate limit per minute and a quota per day.

#Daily quota

• Only successful solutions count. A request that could not be answered is not charged.
• A job is charged once, when the first poll returns its answer. Fetching the same answer again is free.
• The quota resets every day at 00:00 UTC. GET /v1/status shows lastreset, ttl and duration for the UTC day.
• Jobs that you created and that have no answer yet hold a place in your quota for up to 5 minutes. A burst of requests cannot go far above your daily quota.
• A plan has a daily quota. Without a plan, the free tier gives 100 successful solves per UTC day.
• When the daily quota is used up, your key continues from the balance if there is one. See Plans and billing for the order.
• With no quota and no balance left, new requests fail with error 16, Out of credit, until the reset or until you top up.

#Rate limits per minute

Limits are per key and depend on how it pays. Requests above a limit get error 11, Rate limit reached, with HTTP status 429.

• Create requests (POST) and feedback requests use the create limit.
• Poll requests (GET with an id) are limited to 20 times the create limit. A client that polls each open job once per second stays far below it.
• Status requests are limited to 600 per minute.
• A key that only has the free tier can send up to 10 create requests per minute.
• A key that pays from a balance (pay per use) can send up to 300 create requests per minute.
• A key with an active plan uses the limit of its plan from the table.

#Wrong keys

Requests with a missing or wrong key are counted per address: more than 600 per minute from one address get error 11. Requests with a valid key are never limited by address, because many customers share one proxy.

#Stay inside the limits

• Poll once per second per job. Do not poll faster.
• Back off when you get error 11: wait a few seconds, then retry with a longer pause each time.
• Keep a counter of open jobs in your code, and do not create more jobs than you can poll.
• Check GET /v1/status before a large batch. credit is what your key can still solve: the rest of today's quota plus the balance.

#More quota

Pay per use has no daily quota: you can use as much as your balance pays for, within the create limit. Plans have fixed quotas. See Plans and billing for the four plans. If you need more than the largest plan, write to us through the contact form.