Africa's Talking · Rate Limits

Africastalking Rate Limits

Africa's Talking throughput is governed primarily by carrier-imposed delivery rates and per-account messaging caps rather than a single published numeric API rate limit. SMS throughput depends on whether you use a shared or dedicated short code and on telco throttling; large batches are buffered via the enqueue option. Voice concurrency, payments velocity, and airtime limits are bounded by carrier rules and account standing. Specific numeric limits are not published as a single table and are not reconciled in this artifact.

Africastalking Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for Africa’s Talking on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Rate Limits specification.

It captures 5 rate-limit definitions, measuring messages_per_second, messages, concurrent_sessions, concurrent_calls, and transactions.

The profile also includes 2 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled.

Tagged areas include Communications, SMS, USSD, Voice, and Airtime.

5 Limits Throttle: 429
CommunicationsSMSUSSDVoiceAirtimeMobile DataPaymentsAfricaRate LimitingQuotasThrottling

Limits

SMS Throughput account
messages_per_second
see provider documentation
Bounded by carrier delivery rates and shared vs dedicated short code capacity.
Bulk SMS Enqueue account
messages
buffered
Set enqueue=1 to buffer very large outbound batches for paced delivery.
USSD Sessions account
concurrent_sessions
see provider documentation
Session concurrency depends on short code provisioning and carrier limits.
Voice Concurrency account
concurrent_calls
see provider documentation
Concurrent channels depend on registered numbers and carrier capacity.
Payments Velocity account
transactions
see provider documentation
Payment throughput bounded by mobile money provider rules and account wallet balance.

Policies

Carrier-Governed Throughput
Effective rate limits are set by downstream mobile carriers; dedicated short codes raise SMS throughput.
Backoff Strategy
Clients should implement exponential backoff with jitter on 429 responses and honor delivery report callbacks.

Sources

Work with this as data

Every rate limit here is available over the APIs.io API and to AI agents over MCP.

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