Rate limits

Four limits apply, independently:

Limit	Default	Scope	Applies to
Requests per minute	60	Per key	Everything
Requests per day	50,000	Per key	Everything
Requests per minute	300	Per IP address	Everything
Writes per minute	10	Per key	`POST /rentals`, `POST /rentals/{id}/stop`

The write limit is an extra ceiling, not a separate allowance: a write is counted against the general per-minute budget as well. Ten creates in a minute costs ten of your sixty requests, not ten of a private pool.It exists because writes spend money. A loop that has lost track of itself can issue sixty catalog reads a minute harmlessly; sixty rental creations a minute is a different kind of afternoon.

Per-key overrides exist — GET /me reports yours in rate_limit_per_min, where null means the account default. Test keys get a lower limit than live ones. If your workload genuinely needs more, ask help@gpuoutlet.ai. The per-IP limit is a separate rail from the per-key one, so a stolen key cannot be used to hammer the API from a single host — and so one noisy tenant behind a shared NAT does not get to spend everyone’s budget.

Headers on every response

RateLimit-Limit: 60
RateLimit-Remaining: 57
RateLimit-Reset: 43

RateLimit-Reset is seconds until the window resets, not a timestamp. On a 429 you also get:

Retry-After: 12

Treat `RateLimit-Remaining` as advisory

Limits are enforced per API server instance and are approximate. Do not build a client that spends exactly RateLimit-Remaining requests and expects the next one to fail cleanly.

The honest model is: use the headers to pace yourself, and use 429 to stop. A client that only reads headers will occasionally overshoot; a client that only handles 429 will work but waste round trips. Doing both is a few lines.

Backing off

resp = session.get(url, params=params)

if resp.status_code == 429:
    wait = int(resp.headers.get("Retry-After", 5))
    time.sleep(wait + random.random())   # jitter matters, see below
    resp = session.get(url, params=params)

Three rules:

Honour Retry-After. It is the server telling you exactly how long the window has left. Guessing produces either a wasted retry or a needless wait.
Add jitter. Twenty workers that all sleep exactly 12 seconds will all retry in the same millisecond and half will get 429 again. A random fraction of a second breaks the convoy.
Cap the total. Retrying forever turns a transient limit into a hung job.

Daily quota

Separate from the per-minute limit, and it fails differently:

{
  "error": {
    "type": "rate_limit_error",
    "code": "daily_quota_exceeded",
    "message": "The daily request quota for this key is spent. It resets at 00:00 UTC.",
    "doc_url": "https://docs.gpuoutlet.ai/api/errors#daily_quota_exceeded",
    "request_id": "req_e08c2f5a71d4"
  }
}

Backing off for thirty seconds will not help here — the window is the rest of the UTC day. Handle this code distinctly from rate_limited: alert, and stop the loop, rather than sleeping in it.

Staying well under

Page with limit=200, not limit=10

The same 1,000 offers cost 5 requests instead of 100. The maximum page size is 200; there is no reason to leave it at the default when you are walking a whole result set.

Cache reference data

/gpu-models, /regions and /prices change on the order of days. Fetch them once at startup, not once per user action.

Poll provisioning rentals every 2–3 seconds, not every 200ms

Provisioning takes tens of seconds. Polling five times a second spends 300 requests a minute — your entire budget — to learn the same thing a dozen requests would have told you.Once a rental is running, stop polling it altogether unless you have a reason.

Filter server-side

/offers?gpu_family=h100-80gb&region=us-east-1&available=true costs one request. Fetching the whole catalog and filtering in your process costs dozens and gives you the same answer, slightly staler. Every filter is listed in Browsing the catalog.

One client, not one per thread

The per-key limit is shared across every process using that key. Ten workers with their own idea of “60 per minute” produce 600.

Get started

API keys

Conventions

Catalog

Rentals

Radar

Headers on every response

Treat `RateLimit-Remaining` as advisory

Backing off

Daily quota

Staying well under

​Headers on every response

​Treat RateLimit-Remaining as advisory

​Backing off

​Daily quota

​Staying well under

Headers on every response

Treat `RateLimit-Remaining` as advisory

Backing off

Daily quota

Staying well under