Spoonacular · Rate Limits

Spoonacular Rate Limits

Spoonacular enforces two layers of limiting, both scoped to the API key. A request-rate / concurrency limit applies per second and is fixed by the subscription tier (Free 1 req/s and 2 concurrent, up to Chef 20 req/s and 20 concurrent). Separately, a daily points quota meters total consumption: every call costs points (typically 1 point + 0.01 per result, with surcharges for nutrition, image generation, and video extraction). When the daily quota is exhausted the Free tier returns HTTP 402; paid tiers continue and bill the overage. Quotas reset at midnight UTC. Usage is reported back in response headers on every call.

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

It captures 6 rate-limit definitions, measuring requests_per_second and varies.

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

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting, Food And Drink, Recipes, and Usage Based.

6 Limits Quota: 402
Rate LimitingFood And DrinkRecipesUsage Based

Limits

Request rate (Free tier) key
requests_per_second · second
1
Free tier also capped at 2 concurrent requests.
Request rate (Cook tier) key
requests_per_second · second
5
5 concurrent requests.
Request rate (Culinarian tier) key
requests_per_second · second
10
10 concurrent requests.
Request rate (Chef tier) key
requests_per_second · second
20
20 concurrent requests.
Daily points quota (Free tier) key
varies
50 points/day (point cost varies by endpoint)
Returns HTTP 402 once exhausted; resets at midnight UTC.
Daily points quota (paid tiers) key
varies
1,500 (Cook) / 4,500 (Culinarian) / 10,000 (Chef) points/day; Enterprise custom
Overage billed per additional point at the tier rate; resets at midnight UTC.

Policies

Points-based metering
Each call costs points rather than counting flat requests — 1 point per request plus 0.01 per result, +0.1 for nutrition data, +3 for image generation, +50 for video extraction. Budget against points, not call count.
Per-key scoping
Both request-rate and daily-quota limits are scoped to the API key, so each key has its own independent budget.
Monitor usage headers
Read X-API-Quota-Request (cost of the call) and X-API-Quota-Used (cumulative daily usage) on every response to track remaining budget.
Quota reset
The daily points quota resets at midnight UTC; schedule heavy batch workloads accordingly.
Tier upgrade for higher throughput
Request-rate, concurrency, and daily quota all scale with the subscription tier; upgrade the plan rather than retrying against a hard cap.

Sources

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.
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Call it yourself

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

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