Rate Limits

The API has a single free tier with the following limits:

Limit	Value
Requests per second	10
Burst	20
Monthly requests	30,000

Per-endpoint throttle overrides

Historical endpoints have lower rate limits to protect against abuse:

Endpoint	Rate limit
/gp/{id}/history	2 req/s
/gp/{id}/nearest	2 req/s
/gp/{id}/adjacent	2 req/s
All other endpoints	10 req/s (plan default)

Pagination limit

Maximum pagination offset is 10,000. Use filters to narrow results for large datasets.

Rate limit headers

Every response includes rate limit information:

Header	Description
X-RateLimit-Limit	Monthly quota
X-RateLimit-Reset	UTC epoch seconds when the quota resets (start of next month)

Exceeding the limit

If you exceed the rate limit, you'll receive a 429 Too Many Requests response:

{
  "error": "TooManyRequests",
  "message": "Rate limit exceeded. Try again in 3 seconds.",
  "status": 429
}

Best practices

Cache responses locally. Current GP data is updated once per day. There's no need to poll more frequently than every few hours for most use cases.

Use bulk endpoints. Instead of requesting one satellite at a time in a loop, use GET /gp with filters (e.g., ?group=starlink) to fetch many records in a single request.

Respect X-RateLimit-Limit. Implement exponential backoff on 429 responses.