Gutendex · Rate Limits

Gutendex Rate Limits

Gutendex does not publicly document any hard rate limit, API key requirement, or quota on its hosted instance at https://gutendex.com. Pagination is fixed at 32 results per page on /books, and the search parameter caps keyword tokens at 32. Operators of self-hosted Gutendex instances may impose their own infrastructure-level limits (e.g. via nginx, Cloudflare, or Django middleware). Clients should be courteous: cache responses, throttle bursts, and back off on transient errors to avoid impacting the community-funded hosted instance.

Gutendex Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for Gutendex on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Rate Limits specification.

It captures 3 rate-limit definitions, measuring items_per_page, tokens_per_request, and undocumented.

The profile also includes 5 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for notFound.

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting, Books, and Open Source.

3 Limits
Rate LimitingBooksOpen Source

Limits

Results per page response
items_per_page · request
32
Search terms per query query
tokens_per_request · request
32
Hosted instance request rate global
undocumented · undocumented
-1

Policies

No published rate limit
Gutendex does not document a hard per-IP or per-key rate limit. The hosted instance relies on community goodwill; clients should self-throttle and cache responses.
No authentication
All endpoints are publicly accessible with no API key, OAuth, or signup requirement.
Pagination
/books always returns a maximum of 32 book objects per page, with `next` and `previous` URLs in the response wrapper for navigation.
Self-hosting recommended for high volume
For production workloads or large-scale analytics, run a private instance of github.com/garethbjohnson/gutendex rather than the shared hosted endpoint.
Backoff on errors
Treat transient 5xx responses with exponential backoff. The hosted instance is a small Django deployment without a documented retry-after header.

Sources

Work with this as data

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

MCP server

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https://apis.io/mcp

Tools for rate limits

4 MCP tools reach this
  • find_rate_limitsBrowse and filter every rate limit in the catalog.
  • apis_io_searchSTART HERE — APIs, providers and tags for one query, each with its total.
  • resolveTurn a domain, URL or GitHub org into the provider it belongs to.
  • find_cohortsEvery scored population of providers in the catalog.
All 92 tools →

Call it yourself

curl for this page
This rate limit 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits/gutendex-rate-limits"
All rate limits 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits?limit=25"

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