Instacart · Rate Limits

Instacart Rate Limits

Instacart throttles per second and publishes no number. Both the Developer Platform and the Connect error references define HTTP 429 as "the number of your requests has exceeded the rate limit for requests per second", and neither states what that rate is. There is no published quota, no burst allowance, and — the part that matters most for an automated client — no rate-limit response headers of any kind. No X-RateLimit-*, no RateLimit-*, no Retry-After. A caller cannot read its remaining budget or learn when to come back; it can only observe the rejection and guess. Persistent 429s are a conversation with your Instacart representative, not a self-service tuning exercise.

Instacart Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for Instacart on the APIs.io network, in the API Commons Rate Limits shape.

It captures 2 rate-limit definitions, measuring requests_per_second and not published.

Limit state is signalled in the published, request, response, and retry_after response headers, and an exhausted limit returns HTTP 429.

The profile also includes 5 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled, serviceUnavailable, and timeout.

Tagged areas include Grocery, E-Commerce, Marketplace, and Rate Limiting.

2 Limits Exhausted: HTTP 429 publishedrequestresponseretry_after
Transcribed from the provider's documentation on 2026-08-27 — docs.instacart.com/developer_platform_api/api/error_and_s....
View Source
GroceryE-CommerceMarketplaceRate Limiting

Limits

Per-second request threshold per-key
requests_per_second · per 1s
Documented as a per-second rate limit; the numeric value is not published.
MCP server rate limits per-partner
not published
"For onboarding, access provisioning, rate limits, and monitoring, contact your Instacart representative." https://docs.instacart.com/mcp_servers/get-started/use-instacarts-mcp-server

Policies

HTTPS required
All requests must use HTTPS; requests over plain HTTP fail.
Backoff strategy
On 429 or 5xx, back off and retry with exponential backoff and jitter. Instacart asks partners to discuss their retry plan with their representative before implementing it. Note there is no idempotency key, so a retried write can duplicate — see conventions/instacart-conventions.yml.
Token reuse
Connect access tokens are valid for 24 hours and must be reused during that period rather than re-minted per request.
Backward compatibility
New fields are additive and optional; deprecated fields and endpoints remain supported for at least six months after the changelog announcement.
Encoding and types
Strings are UTF-8 with no enforced length limits; integers default to int64.

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

One button, every client — Claude, Cursor, VS Code and the rest.

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/instacart-rate-limits"
All rate limits 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits?limit=25"

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