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Reference

Rate Limits and Usage

How Tabstack's per-minute request rate limits work, what the 429 response carries, and where to see your usage and quota.

Two different things get confused here, so keep them apart. Rate limits are requests per minute: exceed them and you get a 429. Usage is dollars and credits you have consumed: a billing concern you read on a different surface, with nothing to do with the 429. If you are being rate-limited, you do not need to look at your spend.


Rate limits are per account. Not per key, not per endpoint. Every key on the account draws from the same per-minute budget, and every endpoint counts against it.

PlanRequests per minute
Trial10
Starter15
Team25
Pro100

Per minute is the only request ceiling. There is no daily or hourly request cap. If you stay under your per-minute limit you can keep calling all day, and the only other ceiling is your credit balance, which is a spend question rather than a rate question. See Pricing for per-endpoint credit costs and monthly credit allowances.

Higher limits than the table are available. Contact support if your workload needs one.

Every response carries rate limit headers, not just 429s. This is the part to build around: read your remaining budget off any successful call and slow down before you run out.

HeaderMeaning
X-RateLimit-LimitThe ceiling for the current window
X-RateLimit-RemainingRequests left in the current window
X-RateLimit-ResetWhen the window resets, as a Unix timestamp in seconds

A successful response looks like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-RateLimit-Limit: 100
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 87
X-RateLimit-Reset: 1717459200
Content-Type: application/json

You get a 429 with the standard error shape, a single error field. See the Error Reference for the full shape. The 429 also carries a Retry-After header telling you how many seconds to wait:

HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Retry-After: 60
Content-Type: application/json
{ "error": "rate limit exceeded" }

Retry-After is the length of the rate limit window, so it is always 60. It is not a countdown to the moment your budget frees up. If you need to know when the current window actually resets, read X-RateLimit-Reset instead: waiting the full 60 seconds is always safe, but often longer than you need.

The SDKs retry 429 automatically with exponential backoff, honoring Retry-After, so most developers using an SDK never handle this by hand. See Production Reliability for the retry and backoff behavior.

The better pattern is proactive: read X-RateLimit-Remaining from a normal response and back off before you reach zero. The reactive fallback is to catch the 429 and read Retry-After.

import Tabstack, { RateLimitError } from "@tabstack/sdk";
const client = new Tabstack();
// Proactive: back off early using the headers on a successful call.
const { data, response } = await client.extract
.json({
url: "https://example.com",
json_schema: { type: "object", properties: { title: { type: "string" } } },
})
.withResponse();
const remaining = Number(response.headers.get("X-RateLimit-Remaining"));
if (remaining < 5) {
console.warn(`Low on budget: ${remaining} requests left this window`);
// slow down: reduce concurrency or pause before you hit zero
}
// Reactive fallback: catch the 429 and honor Retry-After.
try {
await client.extract.json({
url: "https://example.com",
json_schema: { type: "object", properties: { title: { type: "string" } } },
});
} catch (err) {
if (err instanceof RateLimitError) {
const retryAfter = err.headers?.get("Retry-After");
console.warn(`Rate limited. Retry after ${retryAfter}s`);
} else {
throw err;
}
}

For a batch or cron job, the per-minute limit sets your floor on wall-clock time and your credit balance sets your ceiling on total volume. Size against both.

Take 10,000 URLs through Extract (JSON) on Team:

  • Time: 25 requests per minute means at least 400 minutes, close to seven hours. Run it as a paced queue rather than a burst, and keep concurrency low enough that you stay under 25 in any 60-second span.
  • Credits: Extract (JSON) is 50 credits per call, so 10,000 URLs is 500,000 credits, exactly the monthly Team allowance. Anything past that bills as overage.

The two ceilings are independent: raising your rate limit makes the job finish sooner but costs the same, and buying more credits lets you process more URLs but does not let you go faster. See Pricing for per-endpoint credit costs.


Different surface, different units. Usage is what you have spent, measured in dollars and credits, and you read it in the console, not from a response header.

There is no rate-limit visibility in the console. The console shows usage, not your per-minute request budget. Your account’s rate limit is listed on your billing page, and your remaining budget for the current window is in the response headers above.

What the console shows depends on your plan:

  • Trial: credits used against your 10,000 free credits.
  • Starter, Team, and Pro: credits used against credits included (100k on Starter, 500k on Team, 3M on Pro). If you go over your allocation, the console also shows the dollar amount you are over.

For the rate limit that applies to your plan, see your billing page. For spend and quota, go to the console. For per-endpoint credit costs and plan allowances, see Pricing. For a rate limit increase, contact support.