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: Diffbot
providerId: diffbot
created: '2026-05-04'
modified: '2026-09-06'
generated: '2026-09-06'
method: searched
source: >-
  https://www.diffbot.com/docs/rate-limits (the per-plan table), https://www.diffbot.com/pricing,
  https://www.diffbot.com/docs/extract/errors/429, https://www.diffbot.com/docs/credits,
  https://www.diffbot.com/docs/web-search/.
# 2026-09-06: replaced the 2026-05-04 scaffold, whose limits and response headers were
# placeholder defaults, with Diffbot's own published table. The header block below is the
# important correction — the scaffold asserted X-RateLimit-* headers Diffbot does not send.
tags:
  - Extraction
  - Harvesting
  - Scraping
  - Web
  - Rate Limiting
  - Quotas
description: >-
  Published rate limits for the Diffbot API estate. Limits are enforced per plan and apply
  per token. Diffbot notes that some enterprise plans carry custom limits not shown here.
headers:
  limit: null
  remaining: null
  reset: null
  retryAfter: null
  policy: null
  published: false
  note: >-
    MEASURED ABSENCE, not an omission. Diffbot returns no rate-limit response headers on any
    surface — no X-RateLimit-*, no RateLimit-*, no Retry-After. An agent cannot observe its
    remaining budget at runtime; it can only read the plan table in the docs and count its own
    calls. The documented remedy for a 429 is a client-side 1-second pause or an
    exponential backoff the caller implements.
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
  quotaExceeded: 429
  siteThrottled: 500
  note: >-
    429 covers both the caller's own rate limit and Free-plan credit exhaustion
    ("429 Quota Exceeded"). A separate HTTP 500 with errorCode 500 signals a Diffbot-wide
    protective throttle against the TARGET site, which is not the caller's limit. See
    errors/diffbot-error-codes.yml.
limits:
  - tier: free
    name: Free
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_minute
    limit: 5
    timeFrame: minute
    applies: all APIs
    source: https://www.diffbot.com/docs/rate-limits
  - tier: startup
    name: Startup
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_second
    limit: 5
    timeFrame: second
    applies: all APIs
    source: https://www.diffbot.com/docs/rate-limits
  - tier: plus
    name: Plus
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_second
    limit: 25
    timeFrame: second
    applies: all APIs
    source: https://www.diffbot.com/docs/rate-limits
  - tier: enterprise
    name: Enterprise
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_second
    limit: 25
    limitQualifier: '25+ (custom)'
    timeFrame: second
    applies: all APIs
    source: https://www.diffbot.com/pricing
  - tier: free
    name: Extract API monthly cap
    scope: api-key
    metric: calls_per_month
    limit: 10000
    timeFrame: month
    applies: Extract API
    source: https://www.diffbot.com/docs/rate-limits
  - tier: free
    name: Natural Language API monthly cap
    scope: api-key
    metric: calls_per_month
    limit: 500
    timeFrame: month
    applies: Natural Language API
    source: https://www.diffbot.com/docs/rate-limits
  - tier: free
    name: DQL API monthly entity cap
    scope: api-key
    metric: entities_per_month
    limit: 400
    timeFrame: month
    applies: DQL API
    source: https://www.diffbot.com/docs/rate-limits
  - tier: free
    name: Enhance API monthly entity cap
    scope: api-key
    metric: entities_per_month
    limit: 400
    timeFrame: month
    applies: Enhance API
    source: https://www.diffbot.com/docs/rate-limits
  - tier: plus
    name: Crawl / Bulk Extract concurrency
    scope: api-key
    metric: active_jobs
    limit: 25
    applies: Crawl and Bulk Extract
    note: >-
      Plus also carries a 1,000 total-job ceiling. Crawl and Bulk are unavailable on Free and
      Startup. Exceeding the total-job ceiling returns HTTP 505 per the Crawl OpenAPI.
    source: https://www.diffbot.com/docs/rate-limits
  - tier: enterprise
    name: Crawl concurrency
    scope: api-key
    metric: active_jobs
    limit: 100
    limitQualifier: '100+'
    applies: Crawl
    source: https://www.diffbot.com/pricing
  - tier: free
    name: Web Search API
    scope: api-key
    metric: queries_per_minute
    limit: 60
    timeFrame: minute
    applies: Web Search API
    note: >-
      Documented separately from the plan table. A free token includes 100,000 Web Search
      queries per month at 60 QPM with no concurrency; Diffbot quotes >30,000 QPM and 500+
      concurrency under a commercial agreement.
    source: https://www.diffbot.com/docs/web-search/
  - tier: free
    name: Web Search API monthly quota
    scope: api-key
    metric: queries_per_month
    limit: 100000
    timeFrame: month
    applies: Web Search API
    source: https://www.diffbot.com/docs/web-search/
limit_count: 12
quotaModel:
  unit: credit
  note: >-
    Rate limits and quotas are separate axes. Rate limits are calls per second/minute; quotas
    are monthly credit allotments that do not roll over. Overage on a paid plan is billed at
    the plan's per-credit rate with no additional overage fee; on Free it returns 429.
  docs: https://www.diffbot.com/docs/credits