API Call/Minute Limit and How to Avoid It

This is a question we get very often:

“How can I avoid rejected API calls when my app generates more calls than allowed by the plan’s limit?”

To give you the context of the question – all Backendless plans have a limit of API calls/minute. With the free plan the limit is 300, the Cloud 9 plan provides 600 and the Cloud 99 plan offers 1200 API calls/minute. With the Cloud9/99 plans, the limit can be increased by purchasing function packs which add 600 API calls/minute for each purchased pack. The backend monitors and enforces the limit for each minute; that is if you are on the free plan, Backendless will process the first 300 API calls for any given minute and all other calls above the limit during that minute will be rejected. When the volume of the incoming calls reaches 80%, 90% and 100% of the limit, the system will generate and send out an email informing you that a threshold has been reached.

To avoid rejected calls it is important to monitor the performance of your app using Backendless Console and stay on top of the notification emails. Backendless Console provides a chart of API calls/minute on the Manage > Analytics > Performance screen. The red line shows the current limit:

As you can see in the image above, the current limit for the app is 1800 API calls/minute and the app’s traffic stays right below the red line.
When you get a notification about the 80/90% threshold, we recommend analyzing the trend of the incoming calls and assessing whether the limit should be increased. It may be a one-off occurrence of the traffic spike or a consistent growth of the volume of calls.