Rate limits

Requests are counted per credential over a rolling 60-second window. The count is per HTTP request: a POST /v1/bulk carrying 50 searches is one hit, the same as a single GET /v1/query.

The limit is set by your plan. It caps how fast you may call; how much you may call in a month is the separate monthly quota on Pricing and quotas.

Limits per plan

Pricing states this as concurrency. One concurrent request is 60 requests per rolling minute, so a plan’s per-minute limit is its concurrency times 60.

Plan	Concurrency	API key or MCP	Dashboard session
Trial	1 concurrent request	60 / minute	120 / minute
Starter	2 concurrent requests	120 / minute	120 / minute
Growth	5 concurrent requests	300 / minute	300 / minute
Business	10 concurrent requests	600 / minute	600 / minute
Custom	20 concurrent requests and up	1,200 / minute	1,200 / minute

Live and test keys share the plan’s limit, and each key has its own counter: two keys on a Growth account get 300 a minute each. MCP calls made with a key share that key’s bucket with its HTTP calls, and an app connected by signing in is metered per account. A dashboard session never drops below 120 a minute, so the playground stays usable on the trial.

Two principals are not metered by plan:

Principal	Metered on	Requests per minute
RapidAPI marketplace	the marketplace user	1,200
Landing-page demo	the client IP	5

RapidAPI enforces the per-minute limit of the slot you subscribed to before a request ever reaches us; the 1,200 above is the ceiling behind it.

Headers

GET /v1/query and POST /v1/bulk answer with three headers on every response, success or error:

Header	Meaning
X-RateLimit-Limit	Requests allowed per window for this credential.
X-RateLimit-Remaining	Requests left in the window, after this one.
X-RateLimit-Reset	Unix time in seconds at which the current window ends.

The X-Quota-* headers sit alongside them and report the month instead.

A refused request is 429 rate_limited and adds Retry-After, the whole number of seconds to wait, never below 1:

HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
X-RateLimit-Limit: 60
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 0
X-RateLimit-Reset: 1757329260
Retry-After: 37
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "error": "rate_limited",
  "message": "Rate limit of 60 requests per minute exceeded. Retry in 37 seconds.",
  "request_id": "7d1c2f34-1b7e-4d2a-9c33-1f6f0e2b8a90"
}

A refused request costs no credit and no quota.

Getting more throughput

Batch. Fifty searches through POST /v1/bulk cost one hit; the same fifty through GET /v1/query cost fifty. A Growth key’s 300 requests a minute is up to 15,000 searches a minute in bulk. The POST /v1/bulk reference covers per-row overrides and the 60-second batch budget.

Past that, the next plan raises the ceiling. The limits per plan are on Pricing and quotas.