Mediastack · Rate Limits

Mediastack Rate Limits

Mediastack enforces a monthly-quota model rather than a published per-second TPS limit. Each subscription plan ships an included monthly request count; requests beyond that count are either billed as overage (paid plans) or hard-rejected with `usage_limit_reached` (Free plan). Limits are scoped per access_key. Mediastack does not publicly document a per-second or per-minute throttle; bursty clients should self-throttle and use exponential backoff if HTTP 429 is returned.

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

It captures 8 rate-limit definitions, measuring requests_per_month, items_per_response, and feature_gate.

The profile also includes 5 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for invalidAccessKey, functionAccessRestricted, quotaExceeded, and serverError.

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting, News, Quota, and Apilayer.

8 Limits Quota: 429
Rate LimitingNewsQuotaApilayer

Limits

Monthly Request Quota (Free) key
requests_per_month · month
100
Hard cap. Excess requests return success:false with error.code=usage_limit_reached.
Monthly Request Quota (Standard) key
requests_per_month · month
10000
Soft cap. Overage billed at $0.009996 per additional request.
Monthly Request Quota (Professional) key
requests_per_month · month
50000
Soft cap. Overage billed at $0.0079992 per additional request.
Monthly Request Quota (Business) key
requests_per_month · month
250000
Soft cap. Overage billed at $0.00399984 per additional request.
Monthly Request Quota (Enterprise) key
requests_per_month
custom — contact sales
Negotiated volume; SLA-backed.
Page Size request
items_per_response · request
100
Maximum `limit` query parameter value on /news and /sources.
HTTPS Access key
feature_gate
paid-plans-only
HTTPS endpoints (https://api.mediastack.com) require Standard plan or above. Free plan is HTTP only.
Historical Date Access key
feature_gate
paid-plans-only
The `date` query parameter on /v1/news is gated to Standard plan and above.

Policies

Quota Scoping
All quotas are per access_key. Multiple keys on one account each get their own monthly quota.
Soft vs Hard Quotas
Free-plan quota is hard (request rejected). All paid plans are soft (request succeeds and overage is added to the next invoice line). Disable overage in the dashboard if hard caps are required.
429 Retry
On HTTP 429, back off and retry. Mediastack does not publish a Retry-After header; apply exponential backoff (e.g. 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s, 16s) and surface usage_limit_reached errors to operators.
Plan Upgrades
Plan upgrades take effect immediately and reset the monthly counter only at the next billing anniversary; quota is prorated across the period.
Self-Throttling
Because per-second limits are unpublished, high-volume clients should pace requests to stay within their daily share of the monthly quota (e.g. Business plan ≈ 8.3k/day).

Sources

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