specification: API Commons Rate Limits
specificationVersion: '0.1'
generated: '2026-08-09'
method: searched
source: https://www.bargo.ai/free-apis/congress
provider: Bargo
providerId: bargo-congress-trades-api
created: '2026-08-09'
modified: '2026-08-09'
tags:
  - Rate Limiting
  - Congress
  - Free API
description: >-
  Bargo publishes fair-use daily quotas for the free Congress Trades API on two
  independent axes — a request count and a row count — enforced per IP when
  anonymous and per key when a free key is supplied. A second, separate ceiling
  caps page size. The provider explicitly instructs integrators to read live
  quota from the X-RateLimit-* response headers and treat those as
  authoritative over the published figures.
sources:
  - https://www.bargo.ai/free-apis/congress
  - https://www.bargo.ai/llms.txt
  - https://github.com/bargo-ai/bargo-free-api-packages
headers:
  rateLimit: 'X-RateLimit-*'
  requestId: null
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
authoritative: response-headers
limits:
  - name: Requests (keyless)
    scope: ip
    metric: requests_per_day
    limit: 30
    timeFrame: day
    tier: anonymous
  - name: Rows returned (keyless)
    scope: ip
    metric: rows_per_day
    limit: 100
    timeFrame: day
    tier: anonymous
  - name: Requests (free API key)
    scope: key
    metric: requests_per_day
    limit: 100
    timeFrame: day
    tier: free-key
  - name: Rows returned (free API key)
    scope: key
    metric: rows_per_day
    limit: 1000
    timeFrame: day
    tier: free-key
  - name: Page size (keyless)
    scope: request
    metric: rows_per_request
    limit: 100
    timeFrame: request
    tier: anonymous
  - name: Page size (free API key)
    scope: request
    metric: rows_per_request
    limit: 250
    timeFrame: request
    tier: free-key
tiers:
  - id: anonymous
    name: Keyless
    cost: free
    signup_required: false
  - id: free-key
    name: Free API key
    cost: free
    signup_required: true
    signup: https://www.bargo.ai/free-apis/dash
    card_required: false
    key_prefix: fak_
    also_unlocks: The focused Congress MCP endpoint at /free-apis/congress/mcp.
data_window:
  coverage: Rolling last 3 months of trades on the free tier.
  note: >-
    A data-scope limit rather than a rate limit, but it bounds what any quota can
    reach. The full-history dataset is a separate, restricted-access record
    registered on Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21574840).
notes:
  - Both budgets are enforced independently; a few large pages can exhaust the row budget while requests remain.
  - Bulk redistribution of raw records is prohibited by the free API terms even within quota.