429 Rate limited

Too many requests from one IP address in an hour. This is separate from your monthly quota — see quota_exceeded for that.

Three different limits produce this error:

Unauthenticated requests

Requests with no key at all are limited to 60 per hour per IP. Create a free key for 20,000 a month.

A publishable key with no Origin header

Browsers always send Origin on cross-origin requests. If yours does not — curl, some mobile webviews, a server-side proxy — we cannot verify which site the request came from, so it gets a hard per-IP limit instead.

If you are calling from a server, use a secret key (ig_sk_…) instead. Those are designed for callers that send no Origin.

A secret key from one IP

Secret keys are rate limited per IP. If you are running many workers behind one NAT gateway, they share the limit — get in touch and we will raise it.

Retrying

The response includes X-RateLimit-Reset as a Unix timestamp. Wait until then rather than retrying immediately; retrying in a tight loop will not get you served sooner.