Rate limits

Limits are per token, per minute, in three buckets:

Bucket	Limit	Applies to
`read`	600 / min	`GET` endpoints
`write`	120 / min	`POST`, `PATCH`, `DELETE`
`messaging`	20 / min	Endpoints that send email or SMS

Messaging is separate and far tighter because those calls spend real money and land in somebody’s inbox: a runaway loop against /reminders/:id/send is a different kind of incident from a runaway loop against /members.

Every response carries your budget

RateLimit-Limit: 600
RateLimit-Remaining: 435
RateLimit-Reset: 12

RateLimit-Reset is seconds until the window rolls over. A 429 adds Retry-After, also in seconds:

{
  "error": {
    "code": "rate_limited",
    "message": "Rate limit of 600 read requests per minute exceeded.",
    "requestId": "bE6hSMLt6FUnWN2kuCbl4"
  }
}

Before you have a token

A request with no bearer token, or one that doesn’t resolve, answers 401 and carries a different budget: 30 failed authentication attempts per IP per minute, which is what stands between a credential-stuffing script and the token lookup. It is reported with the same headers:

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
RateLimit-Limit: 30
RateLimit-Remaining: 29
RateLimit-Reset: 41

Only failures spend it. A working token never touches this budget, and exhausting it answers 429 with Retry-After.

Some requests cost more than one

A request is priced by the work it asks for, not by being one HTTP call. Reading a chapter’s roster costs ceil(limit / 25) units, so a page of 100 members costs 4:

# 150 of these exhaust the read bucket, not 600
curl "https://api.dueflow.co/v1/chapters/$CHAPTER/members?limit=100" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DUEFLOW_TOKEN"

That’s deliberate: a national syncing 200 chapters at 100 rows a page is 800 units of database work whether or not it looks like 200 requests. Pricing it this way means the limiter stops a runaway sync, rather than the database. Requesting smaller pages does not save you anything – 4 pages of 25 costs the same 4 units as 1 page of 100 – so prefer large pages and fewer round trips.

A malformed request still costs a unit. Otherwise sending garbage would be a free way to hammer the API.

Backing off

On a 429, sleep for Retry-After seconds and retry – with jitter if you run more than one worker, or they’ll all wake up together and collide again.

import random, time, requests

def call(url, token, attempt=0):
    r = requests.get(url, headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {token}"})
    if r.status_code == 429 and attempt < 5:
        time.sleep(int(r.headers.get("Retry-After", 5)) + random.random())
        return call(url, token, attempt + 1)
    r.raise_for_status()
    return r.json()

Better still, watch RateLimit-Remaining and slow down before you hit zero.

Seeing your usage

Each token’s card in the dashboard shows its requests over the last 14 days, its busiest endpoint and its failure rate, broken down per day. Usage is counted by route template, so a 200-chapter sync appears as one endpoint with 200 requests rather than 200 separate paths. That view is the fastest way to answer “what is this integration actually doing?” before an organization’s admins decide whether to keep it.

Getting started

Core concepts

Guides

Every response carries your budget

Before you have a token

Some requests cost more than one

Backing off

Seeing your usage

​Every response carries your budget

​Before you have a token

​Some requests cost more than one

​Backing off

​Seeing your usage

Every response carries your budget

Before you have a token

Some requests cost more than one

Backing off

Seeing your usage