Rate Limits

Missive API rate limits: 5 concurrent requests, 300 per minute, 900 per 15 minutes.

To maintain the performance and reliability of our API we enforce the following rate limits on API requests:

• Maximum of 5 concurrent requests at any given time
• 300 requests per minute (equivalent to 5 requests per second)
• 900 requests per 15 minutes (equivalent to 1 request per second)

When a rate limit is reached, Missive API will return the following HTTP error status code: 429 Too Many Requests with the following headers:

Header	Description
Retry-After	How many seconds the client should wait before attempting a new request
X-RateLimit-Limit	The rate limit ceiling that is applicable for the current request
X-RateLimit-Remaining	The number of requests left for the current rate-limit window
X-RateLimit-Reset	The time at which the rate limit resets, specified in UTC epoch time (in seconds)

1

Continuously query the API (24/7)

Send at most 1 request per second. In most programming languages, you can achieve this with a 1-second “sleep” between requests.

2

Periodic bursts of requests

Send at most 5 requests per second. This way you can spread your usage over time, for instance:

• one burst of 900 requests lasting 3 minutes, every 15 minutes
• one burst of 600 requests lasting 2 minutes, every 10 minutes
• one burst of 300 requests lasting 1 minute, every 5 minutes

Reducing API calls

Some endpoints support batch operations to reduce the number of API calls needed:

• GET /v1/messages/:id,:id2,:id3 - Retrieve multiple messages in a single call by passing comma-separated message IDs. See Get a Message for details.

Using batch endpoints helps you stay within rate limits when processing large volumes of data.

Last updated on July 17th, 2023

Need more specific answers?

Contact us