Rate Limits
Every endpoint has a tier from 1 to 4, and your service tier sets a budget for each. The tier is shown on each endpoint’s reference page. It reflects how much work a call takes to serve: a Tier 1 operation may fan out to several third-party vendors in real time, while a Tier 4 operation is typically a single database read.
Why it matters: the budget is per tier, not per endpoint. Every endpoint in a tier draws from the same buckets, and live and test requests share them too.
Endpoint tiers#
| Tier | What it does | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Real-time operations that may call several third-party vendors per request — the most work per call. | Synchronous person enrich |
| Tier 2 | Search and discovery that scans our index and returns a result set. | Discover people |
| Tier 3 | Single-entity matches, enrichment from our own data, and vendorgraphics. | Company enrich, person & company match, contact-info requests, vendorgraphics |
| Tier 4 | Lightweight reads on our side — typically a single database read. | Bulk-job status, validation, normalization, usage & rate-limit introspection |
Rate limits by service tier#
Each request counts against a per-second budget (RPS) and a per-hour budget (RPH). Both must have capacity, or the request is refused with a 429. Cheaper-to-serve tiers carry higher limits.
| Service Tier | Tier 1 | Tier 2 | Tier 3 | Tier 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise | 100 RPS / 10,000 RPH | 100 RPS / 10,000 RPH | 200 RPS / 25,000 RPH | 500 RPS / 50,000 RPH |
| Growth | 25 RPS / 2,500 RPH | 50 RPS / 5,000 RPH | 50 RPS / 25,000 RPH | 100 RPS / 50,000 RPH |
| Starter | 10 RPS / 1,000 RPH | 10 RPS / 1,000 RPH | 10 RPS / 1,000 RPH | 10 RPS / 1,000 RPH |
Go deeper: the Introspect rate limits endpoint returns your current per-tier allocation, and Rate Limit Headers shows how much budget each response left.