How the Airfree platform applies rate limits and quotas, the headers that report your budget, and how to back off cleanly.
The platform applies rate limits to keep the shared infrastructure fair and stable. Limits are enforced at the edge per client and per service, and are generous for normal use — they exist to contain runaway loops and abuse, not to constrain legitimate applications.
Reading your budget
Every response carries headers describing your current limit, remaining budget, and the time the window resets. Read them rather than guessing.
RateLimit-Limit: 600
RateLimit-Remaining: 574
RateLimit-Reset: 42Handling 429
When you exceed a limit the edge returns 429 Too Many Requests with a Retry-After header. Respect it: wait the indicated interval, then retry with exponential back-off and jitter to avoid a thundering herd.
- Back off exponentially: 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s, capped, with random jitter.
- Never retry a 4xx other than 429 — fix the request instead.
- Cache responses and batch requests to stay well under your limit.
Higher throughput needs are handled per tenant. If your workload legitimately requires a larger budget, request an increase through the Airfree contact desk rather than working around the limit.