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: Chromatic
providerId: chromatic
created: '2026-07-11'
modified: '2026-07-11'
reconciled: false
tags:
- Visual Testing
- Storybook
- GraphQL
- Rate Limiting
- Quotas
description: >-
  Chromatic does not publish fixed numeric per-second or per-minute rate limits for
  its public GraphQL API. In practice the effective limit that matters is the
  monthly snapshot allowance of your plan, and the CLI's own concurrency: builds
  run in parallel up to your plan's parallelism and the CLI polls build status over
  GraphQL until completion. When a build cannot be fully snapshotted within your
  quota it is marked isLimited (representative stories only) rather than throttled
  with an error. Numeric GraphQL request-rate limits are not documented as of the
  review date.
notes: >-
  The billing constraint (snapshots/month) is the real governor of Chromatic usage,
  not an HTTP request-rate cap. Verify any documented GraphQL limits and parallelism
  settings on the Chromatic docs during reconciliation.
sources:
- https://www.chromatic.com/docs/cli/
- https://www.chromatic.com/docs/billing/
- https://www.chromatic.com/docs/turbosnap/
- https://github.com/chromaui/chromatic-cli
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
limits:
- name: GraphQL API Request Rate
  scope: token
  metric: requests
  limit: not published
  notes: No fixed numeric request-rate limit is documented for the public GraphQL API.
- name: Monthly Snapshot Allowance
  scope: account
  metric: snapshots
  limit: per plan (Free 5,000; Starter 35,000; Pro 85,000; Enterprise unlimited)
  notes: The dominant usage governor. Builds exceeding quota are marked isLimited.
- name: Build Parallelism
  scope: account
  metric: concurrent builds
  limit: per plan
  notes: Snapshots run in parallel across cloud browsers; plans include unlimited parallel test runs.
policies:
- name: Snapshot Quota Limiting
  description: When snapshot quota is insufficient, a build is limited to representative stories (isLimited=true) instead of failing.
- name: TurboSnap
  description: Change detection skips snapshotting unchanged stories, reducing snapshot usage by up to roughly 80 percent.
- name: Backoff Strategy
  description: The Chromatic CLI retries GraphQL calls with backoff and polls build status until the build reaches a terminal status.
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com