Rate Limits

Rate limits are measured in credits per minute, not requests per minute. This matters. An Enterprise Bundle call does 35× the work of a single-topic lookup, so it consumes 35× the rate limit budget. A plan with a 300 credits/minute limit allows any of:

300 single-topic calls per minute, or
20 Standard Bundle calls per minute, or
8 Enterprise Bundle calls per minute, or
any mix summing to 300 credits

Plan	Credits per minute
Starter	300
Professional	1,200
Enterprise	Custom

Rate limits and monthly quota are separate. You can have plenty of monthly credits remaining and still be rate limited if you burst too fast in a single minute.

Headers

Every response includes your current rate limit state:

Header	Meaning
`X-RateLimit-Limit`	Your plan’s credits-per-minute ceiling
`X-RateLimit-Remaining`	Credits left in the current minute
`X-RateLimit-Reset`	Unix timestamp (ms) when the window resets

When you hit the limit

You get 429 RATE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED, and the request is not charged.

{
  "error": {
    "code": "RATE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED",
    "message": "Credit-per-minute limit exceeded. This request costs 35 credits but only 12 remain in the current window.",
    "docs_url": "https://docs.areahub.com/errors/RATE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED"
  }
}

Handling limits gracefully

Don’t retry immediately on 429. You’ll just burn through the next window too.

Read X-RateLimit-Reset, wait until that timestamp, then retry. If you’re processing a large batch of locations, pace your requests rather than firing them all at once — a steady 250 credits/minute finishes faster than bursting to 300 and getting throttled.

import time
import requests

def fetch_with_backoff(lat, lng, api_key):
    while True:
        r = requests.get(
            "https://api.areahub.com/v1/bundle/enterprise",
            params={"lat": lat, "lng": lng},
            headers={"X-API-Key": YOUR_API_KEY},
        )
        if r.status_code != 429:
            return r

        reset_ms = int(r.headers["X-RateLimit-Reset"])
        wait = max(0, (reset_ms / 1000) - time.time()) + 0.5
        time.sleep(wait)

async function fetchWithBackoff(lat, lng, apiKey) {
  while (true) {
    const res = await fetch(
      `https://api.areahub.com/v1/bundle/enterprise?lat=${lat}&lng=${lng}`,
      { headers: { "X-API-Key": YOUR_API_KEY } },
    );
    if (res.status !== 429) return res;

    const resetMs = Number(res.headers.get("X-RateLimit-Reset"));
    const wait = Math.max(0, resetMs - Date.now()) + 500;
    await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, wait));
  }
}

Getting Started

Core Concepts

Reference

Headers

When you hit the limit

Handling limits gracefully

​Headers

​When you hit the limit

​Handling limits gracefully

Headers

When you hit the limit

Handling limits gracefully