Shodan · Rate Limits

Shodan Rate Limits

Shodan rate-limit and quota model. Operational throttling is a published per-second cap on the REST surface; commercial limits are enforced as monthly query credits, scan credits, and monitored-IP allotments per subscription tier. CVEDB and InternetDB are open APIs that throttle on abusive traffic but do not consume credits.

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

It captures 17 rate-limit definitions, across the all, developer, membership, freelancer, and small-business tiers, measuring requests_per_second, query_credits, scan_credits, and monitored_ips.

Limit state is signalled in the limit, remaining, reset, and retryAfter response headers, and an exhausted limit returns HTTP 429.

This profile was written by API Evangelist and has not been verified against a page the provider published; treat every limit as unconfirmed until a dated transcription replaces it.

The profile also includes 6 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled, quotaExceeded, and serviceUnavailable.

Tagged areas include Security, Search, Rate Limiting, Quotas, and Throttling.

17 Limits Exhausted: HTTP 429 Quota: 429 limitremainingresetretryAfter
Method: generated, dated 2026-05-28.
Written by API Evangelist on 2026-05-28 and not verified against a page the provider published. Treat every limit as unconfirmed until a dated transcription replaces it.
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SecuritySearchRate LimitingQuotasThrottlingQuery CreditsScan Credits

Limits

REST API Request Rate api-key
requests_per_second · second
1
Developer Query Credits api-key
query_credits · month
100
Developer Scan Credits api-key
scan_credits · month
100
Developer Monitored IPs api-key
monitored_ips · usage
16
Membership Query Credits api-key
query_credits · month
100
Membership Scan Credits api-key
scan_credits · month
100
Membership Monitored IPs api-key
monitored_ips · usage
16
Freelancer Query Credits api-key
query_credits · month
10000
Freelancer Scan Credits api-key
scan_credits · month
5120
Freelancer Monitored IPs api-key
monitored_ips · usage
5120
Small Business Query Credits api-key
query_credits · month
200000
Small Business Scan Credits api-key
scan_credits · month
65536
Small Business Monitored IPs api-key
monitored_ips · usage
65536
Corporate Query Credits api-key
query_credits · month
-1
Corporate Scan Credits api-key
scan_credits · month
327680
Corporate Monitored IPs api-key
monitored_ips · usage
327680
Enterprise Negotiated Limits contract
requests_per_second · second
-1

Policies

Credit Consumption
Query credits are consumed on the second and subsequent pages of search results and on searches that use advanced filters (city, country, net, geo, before, after, org, isp, title, html, vuln, tag, etc.). Scan credits are consumed one-per-IP on `/shodan/scan` submissions.
Backoff Strategy
Clients should implement exponential backoff with jitter and respect the `Retry-After` header when surfaced. The published cap of roughly one request per second per API key applies to the REST surface; the streaming firehose is connection-based.
Credit Reset
Query credits, scan credits, and monitored-IP allotments reset on each subscription billing cycle (monthly for the subscription tiers).
InternetDB Commercial Use
InternetDB is free for non-commercial use; commercial use requires an enterprise license. Abusive traffic patterns may be rate-limited without prior notice.
CVEDB Commercial Use
CVEDB is free for non-commercial use; commercial use requires an enterprise license. CVEDB is updated daily.
Streaming Fair Use
The streaming firehose is a long-lived HTTP connection. Disconnects should be handled with reconnection logic; the `debug=1` parameter surfaces dropped-message counts for monitoring.

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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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

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

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