Steel · Rate Limits

Steel Dev Rate Limits

Steel Cloud meters usage primarily by concurrent browser sessions and monthly browser hours rather than fixed requests-per-second limits, with bundled proxy bandwidth and CAPTCHA solve allotments per plan. Concurrency caps, monthly browser-hour allotments, proxy bandwidth, and CAPTCHA solves scale with the subscription tier (Hobby, Starter, Developers, Startups, Enterprise). Self-hosted steel-browser instances have no Steel-imposed limits beyond local hardware. Specific per-tier concurrency and request values are not reconciled in this artifact.

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

It captures 5 rate-limit definitions, measuring sessions, browser_hours, gigabytes, solves, and requests.

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

Tagged areas include Browser, Web Automation, Scraping, AI Agents, and Open Source.

5 Limits Throttle: 429
BrowserWeb AutomationScrapingAI AgentsOpen SourceRate LimitingQuotasThrottling

Limits

Concurrent Sessions account
sessions
see provider documentation
Maximum simultaneous live browser sessions, varies by tier.
Browser Hours account
browser_hours
see plan allotment
Monthly included browser hours per tier (100 / 290 / 1238 / 9980 / custom).
Proxy Bandwidth account
gigabytes
see plan allotment
Monthly proxy bandwidth included per tier.
CAPTCHA Solves account
solves
see plan allotment
Monthly CAPTCHA solve allotment per tier.
Quick Action Requests account
requests
see provider documentation
Stateless scrape / screenshot / pdf / search requests.

Policies

Tiered Limits
Concurrency and monthly allotments raise as accounts move from Hobby to paid and Enterprise tiers.
Self-Hosted Exemption
Self-hosted steel-browser instances are not subject to Steel Cloud limits; throughput is bounded only by local resources.
Backoff Strategy
Clients should implement exponential backoff with jitter on 429 responses and honor Retry-After where present.

Sources