# Rate limiting

When the capacity of a service is shared among many users or consumers, it can apply rate limiting per user to provide fair and reasonable use, without affecting other users. These limits might be applied over time periods, or they might be applied to resources that are not measured by rate but by quantity allocated.

In order to provide a better API service, we will be introducing an improvement for our rate limiter for API requests as of Monday 20th, December 2021.

When using resources from the Alephee API, you can perform a limited number of requests in a given period of time.

The approach used to rate limit the API usage is based on the “[Generic Cell Rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_cell_rate_algorithm)” algorithm implementation, where the API controls the flow, the number of request and the burst rate of requests in a certain period of time.

Currently, the rate limiting of the API is considered per API\_KEY, not per company, and rate limit window duration is 1 (one) minute. So, when an application uses the same API\_KEY for several accounts, all of requests of all the accounts have a limited result rate.

When an application exceeds the maximum number of requests in the time-window given, the API will not process the request and will return an [error code 429](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes) (Too many requests). In this case, it is your responsibility to avoid breaking the API rate limits and retry your request later.

Please note that this strategy will not impact most users, even if you are a heavy user of our API. This rate limiting is designed to prevent undesired loads on our systems from misconfigured API integrations or abuse.

Each of the API endpoints has a different rate limit and they are documented in the next sections.\
Graphical EXAMPLE of rate limit when calling an API endpoint with a limitation of (for instance) of 4 calls per minute:

<figure><img src="/files/b7jnFYR9VX4PgIV4zOKt" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>


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