Rate Limits & Retry Logic

Limits by plan

Plan	Price/request	Requests included	Rate limit
Free trial	free	100	1 req/sec
Start	$0.02	1,000	15 req/sec
Standard	$0.001	100,000	15 req/sec
Business	$0.00069	434,000	15 req/sec
Ultra	$0.0006	~1,000,000	15 req/sec

All paid plans share the same rate limit of 15 requests per second. The free trial is limited to 1 req/sec.

If you exceed the per-second limit, the server returns 429 Too Many Requests.

Handling rate limits

1. Monitor frequency — stay under your req/sec limit
2. On 429 — pause 1-2 seconds, then retry
3. Use semaphores — limit concurrent requests in async code

Need more than 15 req/sec? Contact our team — we offer custom rate limits for high-volume integrations.

Check your current rate limit

curl -H "x-access-key: YOUR_TOKEN" "https://api.hikerapi.com/sys/balance"

The rate field in the response is your current requests/second limit.

Example: Async with rate limiting

import httpx
import asyncio

headers = {
    "x-access-key": "YOUR_TOKEN",
    "accept": "application/json",
}

# Get your rate limit
rate_limit = httpx.get(
    "https://api.hikerapi.com/sys/balance", headers=headers
).json()["rate"]

semaphore = asyncio.Semaphore(rate_limit)


async def get_followers(user_id: str) -> list:
    async with httpx.AsyncClient(timeout=20) as client:
        params = {"user_id": user_id, "page_id": "", "force": "on"}
        followers = []

        while True:
            async with semaphore:
                response = await client.get(
                    "https://api.hikerapi.com/v2/user/followers",
                    params=params,
                    headers=headers,
                )
                if response.status_code == 429:
                    await asyncio.sleep(2)
                    continue
                elif response.status_code == 402:
                    raise Exception("Insufficient balance")

                res = response.json()
                users = res["response"]["users"]
                page_id = res["next_page_id"]
                followers.extend(users)

                if not page_id:
                    break
                params["page_id"] = page_id

        return followers


async def main():
    user_ids = ["1553030189", "12345", "4238157586"]
    tasks = [asyncio.create_task(get_followers(uid)) for uid in user_ids]
    results = await asyncio.gather(*tasks)
    print(f"Got followers for {len(results)} users")


asyncio.run(main())

Need higher limits?

Contact us to discuss custom rate limits for your use case. Starting at $0.0006/request — see pricing →