Rate limits

Orbit applies rate limits per API key. Limits use token buckets: short bursts are allowed up to the bucket capacity, and capacity refills continuously.

Default limits

Operation	Refill rate	Burst capacity
Start a standard Search	25 requests/second	100
Start candidate discovery or Enrich work	5 requests/second	25
Get Search status	25 requests/second	150
Get Enrich status	25 requests/second	150
Read an enriched profile	50 requests/second	250

These are platform defaults, not a throughput guarantee. Account-specific configuration may differ, and one Search can use more than one bucket when it starts additional discovery or profile work.

Rate-limit responses

When a bucket is empty, Orbit returns 429 Too Many Requests, the error code developer_api_key_rate_limited, and a Retry-After header measured in seconds.

{
  "status": "failed",
  "error": {
    "code": "developer_api_key_rate_limited",
    "message": "Developer API key rate limit exceeded. Please retry later."
  }
}

Honor Retry-After before retrying. Add exponential backoff and jitter when repeated retries are possible.

const retryAfter = Number(response.headers.get("retry-after") ?? "1");
await new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, retryAfter * 1000));

Poll only while an operation is running. Stop immediately on a terminal status to conserve status capacity.

Credits

v3 Search and Enrich do not consume API credits. Rate limits still protect platform capacity, so a free request can still return 429.

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Default limits

Rate-limit responses

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​Default limits

​Rate-limit responses

​Credits

Default limits

Rate-limit responses

Credits