Lightspeed · Rate Limits

Lightspeed Pos Rate Limits

The Lightspeed Retail R-Series API enforces a per-account leaky-bucket rate limit. Each request adds a variable cost (X-LS-Api-Request-Cost drips) to a bucket that drains at one drip per second (X-LS-Api-Drip-Rate); the account's bucket size scales with the number of registers on the subscription. The X-LS-Api-Bucket-Level header reports current fill as level/size. Exceeding the bucket returns HTTP 429. The Retail X-Series (Vend) API and Restaurant K-Series API apply their own per-key request throttling and likewise signal back-pressure with 429 plus Retry-After. Limits are per-account / per-API-key rather than per-IP.

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

It captures 4 rate-limit definitions, measuring leaky_bucket_drips, varies, and requests_per_second.

The profile also includes 3 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled.

Tagged areas include POS, Retail, Restaurant, Ecommerce, and Rate Limiting.

4 Limits Throttle: 429
POSRetailRestaurantEcommerceRate LimitingQuotasThrottling

Limits

R-Series leaky bucket (per account) account
leaky_bucket_drips
bucket size scales with register count; drains at 1 drip/second
Each request adds X-LS-Api-Request-Cost drips; the bucket leaks one drip per second (X-LS-Api-Drip-Rate). Current fill is reported as X-LS-Api-Bucket-Level (level/size). 429 once full.
R-Series request cost account
varies
per-operation drip cost (read operations cheaper than writes/bulk)
Expensive operations consume more bucket capacity per call.
X-Series (Vend) request throttle key
requests_per_second
see x-series-api.lightspeedhq.com/docs/rate_limiting
Per-API-key throttling; honor 429 and Retry-After.
K-Series (Restaurant) request throttle key
varies
per-client throttling; honor 429
Restaurant K-Series applies per-client back-pressure on the Order & Pay and data endpoints.

Policies

Leaky-bucket pacing
On R-Series, read X-LS-Api-Bucket-Level before issuing bursts; keep level well below size and let the bucket drain at 1 drip/second. Batch or cache reads to lower aggregate request cost.
Backoff strategy
Implement exponential backoff with jitter on 429 responses and honor any Retry-After header.
Scope awareness
Limits are bound to the account (R-Series, scaling with registers) or the API key (X-Series, K-Series), not the client IP. Provisioning more registers raises the R-Series ceiling.

Sources