Rate limits

Every request is counted against the key that made it, not the address it came from — so one team's automation behind one office connection can't spend another's budget, and a key that gets shared around carries its own ceiling with it.

There are two budgets, both measured over a rolling 60 seconds:

Nothing carries over. A minute in which you make no calls doesn't bank you a larger one.

Export counts as a write#

It's the one GET that doesn't come out of the read budget, and the reason is what it does rather than which verb it uses: an export builds every artifact of the pack on demand — the Java .zip, the Bedrock .mcpack and the rest — so it belongs in the budget sized for work, not the one sized for polling.

Being refused#

A request over budget answers 429 with the usual envelope and a Retry-After header in whole seconds:

{
  "error": {
    "code": "rate_limited",
    "message": "Too many requests on this API key. Try again in 24s."
  }
}

Wait out Retry-After and carry on. The window doesn't extend when you're refused, so a client that retries politely is never punished for having been refused once — but a client that retries immediately and repeatedly will simply keep being refused until the window rolls over.

Polling inside the read budget#

The read number is set by the polling advice on Jobs and polling rather than the other way round. A job polled every two seconds is 30 requests a minute, so 120 is four generations in flight at once without anybody having to think about it.

If you need more than that, poll less often rather than fewer jobs — a model takes minutes, and checking it every two seconds buys nothing over checking it every ten.

Credits are still the real throttle#

Rate limits stop a loop; they don't stop spend. A generation you can't afford is refused with 402 insufficient_credits however slowly you ask for it, and a generation you can afford costs the same whether it was your first call of the minute or your thirtieth. The two limits answer different questions and neither substitutes for the other.