Rate Limiting

The Pixee PIM API enforces per-endpoint rate limits to ensure fair usage and platform stability. Limits are tracked in Redis, organized into 26 tiers, and persist across API instances.

Rate limit tiers

Endpoints are grouped into tiers by category, each with its own limit and sliding window. Limits below were raised significantly in v6.19 to accommodate large catalogs (100k+ products) — most read/write tiers increased 5–10×; AI batch got stricter (cost control).

Auth

Read

Write

Bulk

AI

Export & data access

Public & health

Rate limit headers

X-RateLimit-* headers are injected only on authenticated endpoints accessed via API key. They are not present on every response.

X-RateLimit-Limit: 1000
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 987
X-RateLimit-Reset: 1758100460

Handling rate limit errors

When you exceed the limit, the API returns 429 Too Many Requests. This response uses a distinct shape from the standard error envelope described in Errors — it comes from a separate rate-limiting layer that has not been unified onto it:

{
  "error": "rate_limit_exceeded",
  "message": "Too many requests. Please try again later.",
  "detail": "5 per 15 minute",
  "retry_after": "Please wait before making more requests"
}

Retry strategy

We recommend exponential backoff with jitter:

import time
import random
import httpx

def call_with_backoff(url, headers, max_retries=5):
    for attempt in range(max_retries):
        response = httpx.get(url, headers=headers)
        if response.status_code == 429:
            wait = (2 ** attempt) + random.uniform(0, 1)
            time.sleep(wait)
            continue
        return response
    raise Exception("Max retries exceeded")