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My API rate limit habit was backwards for 2 years
I used to set rate limits super high on every endpoint because I thought customer frustration was the worst outcome. Then last month a partner integration in Seattle hit my orders API 4,000 times per minute and brought down the whole service for 11 minutes. That outage cost us a contract worth about $18k and made me finally read the logs, which showed the real problem was my lack of queueing, not the limits. Has anyone else found that throttling early and often actually builds trust with clients who expect bursts? I'm curious how others balance 429s against protecting the core.
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spencerm461mo ago
Honestly, throttling early and often just punishes the people who actually want to use your stuff. The real fix is making the system handle the burst, not hiding behind a wall of 429s and calling it "protection." Clients remember getting blocked way more than they remember a quick blip that you fixed fast.
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