Reference

Rate limits, quotas & errors

Per-plan monthly quotas, per-minute burst limits, rate-limit headers, and every error shape the API returns.

Plans are compared on the pricing page; this page is the full fine print. Limits are enforced at the API gateway, per account — all your keys share the same budgets.

Monthly quotas

Free Pro Advanced
Elevation lookups / month 10,000 1,000,000 5,000,000
Data out / month 500 MB 50 GB 250 GB
  • Lookups are counted per point, not per request. A points call with 512 coordinates, or a sample call with samples=512, costs 512 lookups. Raster calls don't consume lookups.
  • Data out covers raster-extract response bytes and COG downloads (charged at full file size). Point lookup responses are tiny JSON and don't count.
  • Quotas are charged only on successful (2xx) responses and reset at the start of each calendar month (UTC).
  • Need more? [email protected].

Per-minute burst limits

Anonymous Free Pro Advanced
STAC requests / min 30 (per IP) 300 1,000 1,000
Elevation points / min — 100 3,000 12,000
Raster calls / min — 2 20 60
Max points per request — 100 512 512
Max raster size (px per side) — 512 2,500 2,500
STAC page size (default / max) 10 / 100 10 / 100 10 / 100 10 / 100

Elevation points/min is point-weighted like the monthly quota: one 512-point batch consumes 512 units of a Pro plan's 3,000/min budget. Burst capacity is reserved before a request is processed, so requests that finish with a 4xx or 5xx still consume per-minute capacity. They are never charged to monthly quotas. A request rejected by the burst limiter does not consume additional capacity; wait until X-RateLimit-Reset before retrying. There are no overage bills: past a monthly quota the API returns 429 until the month rolls over or you upgrade.

STAC requests/min is page-weighted: /search and /collections/{id}/items calls consume one unit per 10 items requested (a limit=100 page costs 10 units; everything else, including metadata routes, costs 1). Small pages and narrow filters stretch your budget further than crawling at limit=100.

Rate-limit headers

Every response carries the state of the limiter that applied to it:

Text
X-RateLimit-Limit: 300
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 297
X-RateLimit-Reset: 1783041000

X-RateLimit-Reset is a Unix timestamp (seconds). On 429, wait until the reset before retrying — a simple sleep-until-reset loop is more effective than exponential backoff here, because windows are fixed, not sliding.

Error reference

Key off the HTTP status code (and X-RateLimit-* headers), not the body text.

Status When Body
400 Invalid elevation parameters {"status": "INVALID_REQUEST", "error": "…"}
401 Elevation or download call without authentication {"detail": "Authentication is required for the elevation API"} / …to download assets"}
403 Plan doesn't include the endpoint (e.g. downloads on Free) {"detail": "The current plan does not include this endpoint"} / …downloads"}
404 Unknown route, collection, item, or asset — including collections outside your plan {"detail": "Not found"}
405 POST to a STAC route other than /search {"detail": "Method not allowed"}
429 Per-minute limit hit {"detail": "Rate limit exceeded"} + X-RateLimit-* headers
429 Monthly quota exhausted {"detail": "Monthly lookup quota exceeded"} / {"detail": "Monthly data-out quota exceeded"}
500 Elevation backend failure {"status": "SERVER_ERROR", "error": "…"}
502 Upstream service unavailable {"detail": "…"}

An invalid or revoked key is not an error on STAC routes — it falls back to anonymous access silently. See authentication.

Playing nice

  • Batch point lookups into points calls instead of many point calls — same lookup cost, far fewer requests against the per-minute window.
  • Cache responses on your side; elevation for a fixed location doesn't change between data releases.
  • Use bbox/datetime filters and reasonable limits on STAC search instead of paginating the world.