What's the current api call limit for free plan?

ProjectNova · ‎08-02-2021

So far this forum post is the closest to answering my question.
The forum post said that "Free/Plus/Pro Dropbox accounts don't have any API limits at all" and "Dropbox has raised the "Data Transport Limit" from 25,000 calls per month to 1,000,000 per month".
They're a bit contradictory so I'm asking it here again.

So my questions are...

1. I'm using a free account with 1 app. What should be my API call limit?

2. Is the 1,000,000 API calls per month legit? I haven't seen any official announcement backing the forum post.

3. What counts as Data Transport in the Data Transport Limit?

My application depends a lot on reading from the data inside the dropbox account as well as writing to it so it does like 9,000 API calls in a span of 12 hours. I'm just clarifying so I can decide early on whether I should use dropbox or move to another cloud storage.

Greg-DB · ‎08-03-2021

The "don't have any API limits at all" claim you quoted was not posted by a Dropbox employee and is not accurate.

1. The Dropbox API does have a general rate limiting system that applies to all account types, including free accounts, but we don't have any specific numbers documented for that. It is relatively generous though and the limits operate on a per app-user basis. If you do hit the general limits, the wait period is usually only on the scale of seconds to minutes anyway.

Also note that not all 429s and 503s indicate explicit rate limiting, but in any case that you get a 429 or 503 the best practice is to retry the request, respecting the Retry-After header if given in the response, or using an exponential back-off, if not. I recommend reading the error documentation and Error Handling Guide for more information.

2. Yes, there is an additional specific limit for upload calls to some Dropbox Business team plans, which is now "1 billion API calls/month" for "data transport" noted here. This is a limit on the number of upload API calls that can be made per team per month, for certain Dropbox Business team plans only.

3. This only applies to upload calls, and not other types of calls. You can find more information on this limit in the developer documentation here.

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Greg-DB · ‎08-03-2021

The "don't have any API limits at all" claim you quoted was not posted by a Dropbox employee and is not accurate.

1. The Dropbox API does have a general rate limiting system that applies to all account types, including free accounts, but we don't have any specific numbers documented for that. It is relatively generous though and the limits operate on a per app-user basis. If you do hit the general limits, the wait period is usually only on the scale of seconds to minutes anyway.

Also note that not all 429s and 503s indicate explicit rate limiting, but in any case that you get a 429 or 503 the best practice is to retry the request, respecting the Retry-After header if given in the response, or using an exponential back-off, if not. I recommend reading the error documentation and Error Handling Guide for more information.

2. Yes, there is an additional specific limit for upload calls to some Dropbox Business team plans, which is now "1 billion API calls/month" for "data transport" noted here. This is a limit on the number of upload API calls that can be made per team per month, for certain Dropbox Business team plans only.

3. This only applies to upload calls, and not other types of calls. You can find more information on this limit in the developer documentation here.

ProjectNova · ‎08-03-2021

Aight cool. Thanks for the answer

What's the current api call limit for free plan?

What's the current api call limit for free plan?

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