Rate limits

Limits

Limits apply over rolling 60-second windows, both per key and per account. All keys share the account limit.

Layer	Per key	Per account	Applies to
Requests per minute — chat, responses, search	60	120	`POST /responses`, `POST /chat/completions`, `POST /search`. `POST /batch` and `POST /compare` draw on the same pool, one unit per job or model.
Requests per minute — images	30	60	`POST /images/generations`
Requests per minute — video	2	4	`POST /videos`
Tokens per minute	1,500,000	3,000,000	Chat is weighed by its input estimate plus output ceiling; each image counts 100,000, each video 1,000,000, each search 20,000
Concurrent in-flight requests	20	40	Every billed route. A slot is held for the whole request, including a streaming body
Server-side fallback attempts	120 per minute	—	Silent model and provider fallbacks inside one request
Pre-auth flood cutoff	600 per minute per key and per client IP	—	Checked before authentication; only sheds obvious floods

RPM windows are kept per workload group (chat, images, video, search), so image traffic never consumes chat’s slice. Per-key token and concurrency budgets are shared across every endpoint. Not admission-limited: GET /models, GET /pricing, GET /videos/{id} (poll as often as you like), GET /balance, GET /usage, GET /health. POST /estimate has its own limit of 30 per minute per IP.

Response headers

Included on every successful response from a billed route, and on admission 429s. The 401 (missing/invalid key) and zero-balance 402 checks both run before the rate limiter, so those two error responses don’t carry them.

Header	What it tells you
`X-RateLimit-Limit`	Your per-key requests-per-minute ceiling for this endpoint group
`X-RateLimit-Remaining`	How many you have left in the current window
`X-RateLimit-Reset`	Seconds until the window resets
`Retry-After`	Seconds to wait — on `429`, and also on `409 request_in_flight` and `503 idempotency_unavailable`
`X-Idempotent-Replay`	`true` when a stored response was replayed for a reused `Idempotency-Key`

When you hit a limit

You get a 429 whose body names the layer you hit:

{
  "error": {
    "message": "Rate limit exceeded. Try again in 12 seconds.",
    "type": "rate_limit_error",
    "code": "rate_limit_exceeded",
    "param": null
  },
  "message": "Rate limit exceeded. Try again in 12 seconds.",
  "code": "rate_limit_exceeded",
  "request_id": "req_abc123",
  "retry_after": 12,
  "limit": "key_rpm",
  "scope": "key"
}

limit is one of key_rpm, account_rpm, key_tpm, account_tpm, key_concurrency, or account_concurrency; scope is key or account. Concurrency denials suggest a 2-second retry_after; window denials report the time until the window rolls over. Batch and compare add units (the fan-out size that was counted). The pre-auth flood cutoff answers earlier and more tersely — "Too many requests. Try again in N seconds." with retry_after but no request_id, limit, or scope — because it runs before your key is looked up.

Retry code

The SDK is the shortest safe implementation: it honors Retry-After, uses exponential backoff, retries 429 and 5xx up to maxRetries (default 2), and only retries billed requests when an idempotency key makes replay safe.

const client = new NinjaChat({
  apiKey: process.env.NINJACHAT_API_KEY!,
  maxRetries: 3,
  timeoutMs: 120_000,
});

const response = await client.responses.create({
  model: "gpt-5.6-luna",
  input: "Classify this support ticket.",
});

client = NinjaChat(
    api_key=os.environ["NINJACHAT_API_KEY"],
    max_retries=3,
    timeout=120,
)

response = client.responses.create(
    model="gpt-5.6-luna",
    input="Classify this support ticket.",
)

Tips

Bound concurrency — use a worker pool of at most 20 per key instead of unbounded Promise.all
Video polling doesn’t count — poll as often as you want (every 10s recommended); video submissions are limited to 2 per minute per key
Honor Retry-After — it is more accurate than a fixed sleep
Reuse idempotency keys — retries of billed operations must not create duplicate work

Get Started

Chat

Orchestration

Production

Media & search

Reference

Limits

Response headers

When you hit a limit

Retry code

Tips

​Limits

​Response headers

​When you hit a limit

​Retry code

​Tips

Limits

Response headers

When you hit a limit

Retry code

Tips