API Rate Limiting: Protecting Your Platform Without Annoying Your Users
How we designed a fair, transparent rate limiting system that protects infrastructure without degrading the developer experience.
Rate limiting is essential for platform stability but gets a bad reputation when implemented poorly. Our approach prioritizes fairness, transparency, and developer experience.
Our Strategy
- Token bucket algorithm with per-tenant buckets
- Different limits for read vs write operations
- Burst allowance for legitimate traffic spikes
- Clear rate limit headers on every response (remaining, reset, retry-after)
- Graceful degradation — throttle before rejecting
- Webhook delivery has separate, generous limits
Monitoring
We track rate limit hit rates per tenant and proactively reach out to partners approaching their limits. Most of the time, excessive API calls indicate an integration bug rather than legitimate load.
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