Rate Limiting

Use this guide to stay within your subscription’s request-rate limit and handle throttled requests.

Geoscape applies request-rate limits to protect service availability. The limit is measured in requests per second (RPS) and depends on your Hub subscription plan.

These are request-rate limits, not a guarantee that every API or product has the same credit cost. For credit usage, see Credit usage.

Build for the limit

• Throttle requests in your client rather than sending a burst and waiting for failures.
• Debounce address-autocomplete requests so you do not send one request for every keystroke. Predictive address suggestions require at least three characters. Locality suggestions require at least one. See Autocomplete.
• Cache repeat lookups where your licence and data freshness requirements allow it.
• Use the Batches API for suitable bulk workloads instead of issuing thousands of independent requests.
• Keep a bounded queue and maximum concurrency in workers and background jobs.

Handle 429 Too Many Requests

When the API returns 429, pause before retrying. Use exponential backoff with jitter, cap the number of retries, and avoid retrying all failed requests at the same instant.

Code
async function fetchWithBackoff(url, options, maxRetries = 4) {
  for (let attempt = 0; attempt <= maxRetries; attempt += 1) {
    const response = await fetch(url, options);
    if (response.status !== 429) return response;

    if (attempt === maxRetries) return response;
    const delay = Math.min(30_000, 500 * 2 ** attempt) + Math.random() * 250;
    await new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, delay));
  }
}

Do not retry invalid requests (400), unauthorised requests (401), or missing resources (404) without changing the request. See Error Handling for the broader recovery rules.

Next steps

• Handle errors and retries
• Use the Batches API for bulk workloads
• Browse the API Reference