Rate Limiting

Understand API rate limits and how to handle throttled requests

SignatureAPI enforces rate limits to ensure fair usage and platform stability. Rate limits are applied per API key.

There are two components to rate limiting:

• Rate is the sustained number of requests allowed per second.
• Burst is the maximum number of requests that can be sent in a short spike before throttling kicks in. Once the burst is exhausted, requests are throttled to the sustained rate.

Default limits

Metric	Limit
Rate	10 requests/second
Burst	10 requests

Extended limits

For higher-volume workloads, the extended plan increases both limits:

Metric	Limit
Rate	1,000 requests/second
Burst	1,000 requests

To upgrade to extended limits, contact support.

Rate limit responses

When you exceed the rate limit, the API returns a 429 Too Many Requests response.

// HTTP Status Code 429

{
    "type": "https://signatureapi.com/docs/v1/errors/too-many-requests",
    "title": "Too many requests",
    "status": 429,
    "detail": "The client is sending too many requests per second."
}

Handling rate limits

When you receive a 429 response, wait briefly before retrying. A simple approach:

1. Wait 1 second after receiving a 429 response.
2. Retry the request.
3. If you receive another 429, double the wait time (2 seconds, then 4 seconds, and so on).
4. After 5 retries, stop and log the failure for investigation.