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: Estuary
providerId: estuary
created: '2026-07-01'
modified: '2026-07-01'
reconciled: false
tags:
- Data Integration
- Streaming ETL
- Change Data Capture
- CDC
- Real-Time Data
- Data Pipelines
- Rate Limiting
- Quotas
- Throttling
description: >-
  The Estuary Flow control plane is a Supabase/PostgREST deployment; Estuary
  does not publish explicit numeric request-per-minute limits for the
  control-plane REST API. Practical constraints are shaped by access-token
  expiry, PostgREST result paging, and per-tenant catalog quotas on the number
  of tasks and collections rather than by an HTTP call-rate ceiling. The data
  plane itself is governed by tenant task/collection quotas and connector
  instance counts, not by API request rate.
notes: >-
  No documented per-minute control-plane rate limits were found. Verify tenant
  task/collection quotas and any gateway throttling in the dashboard at
  reconciliation; PostgREST enforces a default row limit on unbounded queries.
sources:
- https://docs.estuary.dev/reference/authentication/
- https://docs.estuary.dev/getting-started/pricing/
- https://docs.estuary.dev/concepts/
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
limits:
- name: Control-Plane API Requests
  scope: account
  metric: requests
  limit: see provider documentation
  notes: No explicit RPM published for the PostgREST control-plane API.
- name: Access Token Lifetime
  scope: token
  metric: seconds
  limit: short-lived (expires; re-issue via generate_access_token)
  notes: Access tokens expire after a predetermined duration; refresh tokens are long-lived.
- name: Tenant Tasks Quota
  scope: tenant
  metric: tasks
  limit: per-tenant quota (tasks_quota)
  notes: Caps the number of running capture/materialization tasks per tenant.
- name: Tenant Collections Quota
  scope: tenant
  metric: collections
  limit: per-tenant quota (collections_quota)
  notes: Caps the number of collections per tenant.
- name: PostgREST Row Limit
  scope: request
  metric: rows
  limit: default paging limit
  notes: Use Range headers or limit/offset query params to page large result sets.
policies:
- name: Token Refresh
  description: Exchange a long-lived refresh token for a short-lived access token via the generate_access_token RPC before it expires.
- name: Backoff Strategy
  description: Clients should implement exponential backoff with jitter and honor Retry-After on 429 responses.
- name: Async Job Polling
  description: Publications and discovers are asynchronous; poll job_status at a modest interval rather than tight-looping.
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com