Rate limits and quotas

The AgencyMax API gateway enforces request rate limits and usage quotas to protect the platform and give every agency consistent performance. Limits are set per API product and apply to each subscription, meaning each subscription key.

Product	Rate limit	Quota
Standard	e.g. 100 calls per 60 seconds	e.g. 500,000 calls per month
Premium	e.g. 500 calls per 60 seconds	e.g. 5,000,000 calls per month

Your subscription's exact limits are shown in the API Portal on the product page.

Rate limits (throttling)

A rate limit caps the number of calls in a short, sliding time window. Once you exceed it, the gateway rejects requests with 429 Too Many Requests until the window moves on:

HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Retry-After: 12
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "statusCode": 429,
  "message": "Rate limit is exceeded. Try again in 12 seconds."
}

Always honor Retry-After. It gives the number of seconds to wait before retrying.

Quotas

A quota caps the total number of calls, or the bandwidth, over a longer period such as a month. Once the quota is used up, the gateway rejects requests with 403 Forbidden until the period resets:

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
Retry-After: 86400

{
  "statusCode": 403,
  "message": "Out of call volume quota. Quota will be replenished in 23:59:59."
}

If you're close to your quota regularly, contact your AgencyMax representative about a higher-tier product.

Handling limits well

• Back off and retry on 429. Wait for the Retry-After interval, then retry. If there's no header, use exponential backoff with jitter (1 s, 2 s, 4 s, ... up to a cap). See Best practices.
• Don't retry right away in a tight loop. That only keeps you throttled.
• Spread out bulk work. Throttle batch jobs on your side instead of relying on the gateway.
• Request only what you need. Use filters such as modifiedSince and a sensible pageSize instead of re-reading whole collections.
• Use webhooks instead of polling. Webhooks tell you when agents change, so you don't need to poll.
• Cache reference data, such as jurisdictions, certification types and pay statuses. It rarely changes.

Other limits

Individual APIs have limits of their own that don't depend on the gateway:

• Page size. List operations cap pageSize. See Pagination.
• Filter list sizes. For example, Agency Management accepts at most 100 agent codes in a single agentCodes filter.
• Request size and timeouts. Keep request bodies small, and expect long-running requests to be cut off by the gateway.