Rate limits and quotas

Calls a minute, clips at a time, failed calls a day and allowances a month, per organisation: all its keys together, following your plan. Calls without a key count per address.

Calls a minute

Every authenticated call counts toward its organisation's limit, all its keys together: marks, time-stamps and usage alike. Windows are whole minutes on the clock (UTC), so the count starts again at the top of each minute. Every response says where you stand:

X-RateLimit-Limit: 10          # calls this minute, for this organisation
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 7       # left this minute
X-RateLimit-Reset: 1792663260  # Unix time (s) when the minute ends

Past the limit the API answers 429 rate_limited with Retry-After in seconds. Spread work across the minute, or move to a bigger plan. The Python SDK waits out a Retry-After of up to a minute by itself.

Failed calls

A mark or check that fails after we worked on it (mark_failed, or a check the checker couldn't finish) counts nothing, so these failures have a daily cap per organisation: Free 100, Indie 300, Startup 1,000, Scale 3,000 a day (UTC). Past it, POST /v1/mark and POST /v1/check answer 429 until 00:00 UTC. Refusals before any work (a file we can't read, a block, the marks left) don't count.

Clips

A clip is marked as a job, and each plan marks a few at a time (Free 1, Indie 2, Startup 3, Scale 5). A clip sent while they're all running answers 429 rate_limited with Retry-After: 30.

A clip that fails after we worked on it (its watermark doesn't read back, or it can't be marked in time: mark_failed) counts nothing, so these failures have a daily cap: Free 3, Indie 10, Startup 10, Scale 20 in 24 hours. Past it, new clips answer 429 until the first of those failures is a day old. GET /v1/marks/{id} says why each failed. Refusals before any work (a clip over our limits, a block, the marks left) don't count.

Calls without a key

The public endpoints count per address instead, with the same headers. An IPv6 address counts by its /64, the block one connection usually comes with.

• POST /v1/verify: 10 files a minute and 200 a day. Without a key, the whole service also answers at most 5,000 checks a day (UTC), and 500 with signed=true; with a key (free), checks count toward your organisation's calls a minute instead. The checker page reads files in your browser and doesn't count here.
• The transparency log, GET /v1/credentials and GET /v1/verify/key: 120 calls a minute.

Monthly allowances

• Marks: one per successful POST /v1/mark, and two per picture the safety check reads (POST /v1/check, or check on a mark). Test keys have their own allowance: 100 marks a month on Free, as many as live on paid plans. Free's 1,000 marks are one allowance per person: their first organisation has them, and any other they create starts with none until it has a paid plan.
• Data returned: the bytes of marked files we send back in cloud mode (1 GB = 10⁹ bytes).
• Time-stamps: one per POST /v1/tsa, up to your plan's marks, again live and test apart.

Allowances run by calendar month in UTC. When one is used up the API answers 402 quota_exceeded until the 1st of the next month, or until you upgrade. A mark is reserved when a request is accepted and given back if anything fails, so only delivered marks count. Your current numbers are in the dashboard, in the X-Marks-Used and X-Marks-Limit headers, and at GET /v1/usage.

Monthly paid plans continue past their allowance at the published extra prices, billed on the 1st, up to ten times the allowance; annual plans stop at it, like Free.