Rate Limits

Understand CometChat API rate limits and how to handle rate limiting in your Flutter application.

Quick Reference for AI Agents & Developers

Rate Limits:

• Core Operations: 10,000 requests/minute (login, create/delete user, create/join group)
• Standard Operations: 20,000 requests/minute (all other operations)

When Rate Limited (HTTP 429):

// Check response headers for retry timing
// Retry-After: 15 (seconds to wait)
// X-Rate-Limit-Reset: 1625143246 (Unix timestamp)

// Monitor current limits via headers:
// X-Rate-Limit: 700 (total limit)
// X-Rate-Limit-Remaining: 699 (remaining requests)

Best Practice: Implement exponential backoff when receiving 429 responses.

CometChat REST API Rate Limits

The rate limits below are for general applications. Rate limits can be adjusted on a per need basis, depending on your use-case and plan. The rate limits are cumulative. For example: If the rate limit for core operations is 100 requests per minute, then you can either login a user, add user to a group, remove a user from a group, etc for total 100 requests per minute.

1. Core Operations: Core operations are rate limited to 10,000 requests per minute. Core operations include user login, create/delete user, create/join group cumulatively.
2. Standard Operations: Standard operations are rate limited to 20,000 requests per minute. Standard operations include all other operations cumulatively.

What happens when rate limit is reached ?

The request isn’t processed and a response is sent containing a 429 response code. Along with the response code there will be couple of headers sent which specifies the time in seconds that you must wait before you can try request again.

Retry-After: 15

X-Rate-Limit-Reset: 1625143246

Is there any endpoint that returns rate limit of all resources ?

No, we don’t provide a rate-limit endpoint.

However, we do provide the following response headers that you can use to confirm the app’s current rate limit and monitor the number of requests remaining in the current minute:

X-Rate-Limit: 700

X-Rate-Limit-Remaining: 699

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