the.com/rate limits
the bouncer who lets you in, just not all of you, and not all at once.
means a system rule capping how many requests a user or app can make in a given time window.
from born in networking and telecom, where routers throttled packet floods to stop congestion; apis inherited the idea to stop the same thing happening to servers.
http status429 means too many requests, literally
common unitoften measured per second, minute, or token bucket
algorithm nameleaky bucket dates back to 1980s network theory
business modeltwitter and openai both sell higher limits as tiers
for instance
twitter api — capped free tier to 1,500 posts read per month in 2023
openai api — enforces tokens-per-minute limits that scale with paid tier
github api — limits unauthenticated requests to 60 per hour per ip
cloudflare — throttles ddos-scale traffic using edge rate limiting rules