Rate Limiting

All Bold APIs are rate-limited to protect merchants from a degraded experience.

The rate limit is approximately 10 requests per second, per service, per user. For example, one user can make approximately 10 requests per second to Bold Checkout, Bold Subscriptions, and Bold Price Rules concurrently.

note

The rate of API responsiveness is not guaranteed and may be affected by other factors, including the complexity of the request made, total volume of requests, or network traffic.

When a user exceeds the rate limit, the API responds with an error. The HTTP status of the error is 429 Too Many Requests, and the response body appears as follows:

{
  "message": "API rate limit exceeded"
}

Handling and preventing rate limit errors

If you experience a rate limit error, the best course of action is to wait one second and retry the request.

You can implement several software development best practices to prevent rate limit errors from happening in the first place:

• Optimize code to limit the number of API calls.
• Check the HTTP status codes of each response.
• Implement a delayed retry for calls that fail.
• Use webhooks where available (such as Bold Subscriptions webhooks) to be notified of changes instead of polling the API for updates.

Rate limits by platform

The following table shows different platform-enforced rate limits (in requests per second, or "rps") based on a shop's platform and service plan. The Default column shows the rate limit if no service plan rate limits are applicable, or if Bold does not recognize the service plan name.

You can find your store's rate limit using the Get Shop Info endpoint.

Platform	Default	Rate limits for available plans	More info
BigCommerce	-	Application_Developer: 16101495 requests/30 seconds Sandbox_Store: 16101495 requests/30 seconds Enterprise: 5884293 requests/30 seconds Enterprise_Plan_Store: 4000000 requests/30 seconds	BigCommerce rate limiting
commercetools	150rps	-	commercetools rate limiting
Shopify	2rps	shopify_plus: 20rps	Shopify API rate limiting
Custom	42rps	-	-