Rate limits

Each API key has a limit in requests per second. It applies to all endpoints together. Going over it returns 429, which is not charged.

Tiers for direct keys

Standard is included once you have topped up. Plus, Pro, Business and Scale are booked under Plan & limits in the dashboard; the monthly fee comes out of your prepaid balance and you can cancel any time. Enterprise is set up with you: write to support@twittrapi.com. The same table is on the pricing page.

RapidAPI and JojAPI keys have the limits of the plan you bought there, shown on the marketplace listing.

How the limit is counted

The limit is a token bucket per key. The bucket holds as many requests as your per-second limit and refills at that rate. A burst of up to one second's worth of requests goes through at once; after that, requests are accepted at the steady rate.

• Every request to an API endpoint counts, including ones that end in an error.
• GET /balance has its own limit of 10 requests per second (burst 20) and does not use your API limit.
• There are no rate-limit headers and no Retry-After header. Pace your requests on the client side.

The 429 response

{ "error": "Rate limit exceeded. Max 30 requests per second" }

The number is your current limit.

Handling 429

Wait and retry. Because the window is one second, a short exponential backoff is enough:

import time
import httpx
 
def get(url, params=None, tries=5):
    for attempt in range(tries):
        resp = httpx.get(url, params=params, headers={"X-API-KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY"}, timeout=60)
        if resp.status_code != 429:
            return resp
        time.sleep(0.25 * 2 ** attempt)  # 0.25 s, 0.5 s, 1 s, ...
    return resp

The official SDKs do this for you: they retry 429 and 5xx responses with backoff (2 retries by default, configurable with max_retries / maxRetries).

For steady high volume, limit concurrency instead of reacting to 429s. With a limit of 30 requests per second and responses that take about one second, around 25 parallel workers keep you under the limit. If you hit 429 regularly, book a higher tier.

Ways to need fewer calls

• /user/users/by/ids returns up to 500 profiles per call, /user/usernames/to/ids resolves up to 100 handles, and /user/usernames/status checks up to 500 handles. Each is one call.
• Pass the numeric user ID instead of username on user timelines. It costs the same and is faster.
• Cache profiles and tweets you have already fetched.