specification: API Commons Rate Limits
specificationVersion: '0.1'
schema: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/interface-research/main/schema/api-commons.yml#/$defs/RateLimits
provider: Captivate
providerId: captivate-fm
created: '2026-07-05'
modified: '2026-07-05'
reconciled: false
tags:
- Podcasting
- Podcast Hosting
- Rate Limiting
- Quotas
description: >-
  Captivate does not publish numeric rate limits for its public API in the
  Postman documentation at docs.captivate.fm. Access is per-account and
  authenticated with a Bearer token obtained by exchanging a user ID and API
  token. The commercial constraint on an account is the plan's monthly download
  allowance (30,000 / 150,000 / 300,000 depending on tier), which governs how
  much listening traffic the hosting will serve - it is not a per-request API
  cap. No per-minute or per-hour request ceiling, burst limit, or 429 policy is
  documented as of the review date.
notes: >-
  All limit values below are UNCONFIRMED / MODELED. Captivate has not published
  API request-rate numbers; the only published account limit is the monthly
  download allowance, which is a hosting/delivery quota rather than an API rate
  limit. Clients should implement conservative backoff and retry on any 429 or
  5xx response. Verify with Captivate support (api@captivate.fm) for
  high-volume or automated integrations.
sources:
- https://docs.captivate.fm/
- https://help.captivate.fm/en/articles/4575980-plans-pricing-faq
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
limits:
- name: API Requests
  scope: account
  metric: requests
  limit: not published
  notes: No numeric per-account or per-endpoint request-rate limit is documented for the Captivate API.
- name: Monthly Download Allowance
  scope: account
  metric: downloads
  limit: per plan (30000 / 150000 / 300000 per month)
  notes: Plan-level hosting/delivery quota on episode downloads, not an API request cap.
- name: Media Upload Size
  scope: request
  metric: bytes
  limit: not published
  notes: Audio upload size limits are not documented in the public API reference (modeled as unconfirmed).
policies:
- name: Authentication Required
  description: All endpoints except POST /authenticate/token require a valid Bearer token in the Authorization header.
- name: Backoff Strategy
  description: Clients should implement exponential backoff with jitter and honor Retry-After on any 429 or 5xx response (recommended; not documented by Captivate).
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com