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
Send a test webhook delivery	0.5 requests/second	10
Start a face search	30 requests/hour	30

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.

What a Limit Counts

Each limit counts requests. A Search or Enrich request draws from its buckets once, when Orbit accepts it, and the operation then continues to completion on its own. At the default refill rate one key can start several hundred discovery or Enrich operations a minute, and because an operation can last minutes, many can be in progress together. Your credit balance sets how many: see operations in progress. Candidate discovery and Enrich draw from one bucket. When one key serves many users, all of them share that key’s buckets, so queue and retry for your combined traffic.

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

API credits and rate limits are independent. A request can return 429 even when credits are available, or 402 when the credit balance cannot cover the requested work. Test webhook deliveries are free, and are limited more tightly than the rest of the API because each one makes an outbound request to your endpoint.

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Default Limits

What a Limit Counts

Rate-Limit Responses

Credits

​Default Limits

​What a Limit Counts

​Rate-Limit Responses

​Credits

Default Limits

What a Limit Counts

Rate-Limit Responses

Credits