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The one to remember

100 requests per minute per authenticated user on /api/*. That is it. Every other endpoint is either unauthenticated (visitor beacons) or has its own limit (see below).

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What counts

Any request under /api/* that carries a valid Clerk bearer token. There is no long-lived API key mechanism today; see the REST API reference. Counted per user, not per IP.

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Headers

Every rate-limited response includes:
  • X-RateLimit-Limit, the ceiling (100).
  • X-RateLimit-Remaining, how many are left in the current window.
  • Retry-After, on a 429, how many seconds until you can try again.

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When you hit it

429 Too Many Requests. Wait Retry-After seconds and try again.

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Fails open

The rate limiter runs on a Durable Object. If the DO is unreachable for a moment, the request goes through anyway. We would rather occasionally miss enforcement than block legitimate dashboard traffic during a Cloudflare incident.

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What is not rate-limited

  • POST /e, the exposure beacon. Not rate-limited. This is the visitor-facing hot path; a rate limit would drop real data.
  • POST /err, snippet errors. Not rate-limited (uses first-occurrence-per-session dedup instead).
  • POST /m, library telemetry. Not rate-limited.
  • GET /g, edge geo. Not rate-limited.
  • GET /s/*, the snippet download. Not rate-limited (served from Cloudflare’s CDN).
  • GET /a/*, asset downloads. Not rate-limited.
  • /webhooks/*, signature-verified, not rate-limited.

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For a serious integration

100 requests per minute is enough for a dashboard, a scripted export, or a small automation. It is not enough for a real product built on top of the API. If you are building a real integration:
  • Batch reads. Most list endpoints support pagination, grab 100 items at a time.
  • Cache. The digest endpoints are designed to be pollable and cheap.
  • Talk to us. Higher limits are available on a case-by-case basis for legitimate integrations. Email support with the shape of your integration and the request rate you actually need.

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Egress

There is no separate egress limit. If your integration downloads large exports, the download itself is not counted against the API rate limit (the download URL is a separate endpoint served by R2).

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What we do not do

  • Per-IP rate limiting. Legitimate offices behind a shared IP would otherwise share a 100/minute budget.
  • Per-endpoint sub-limits. All /api/* share the same 100/minute bucket.
  • Retry with jitter guidance. Do it. We do not enforce or penalize retries beyond the Retry-After header.
Last modified on August 5, 2026