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: Fern
providerId: fern
created: '2026-05-04'
modified: '2026-05-22'
tags:
  - AI
  - API Definitions
  - Code Generation
  - Developer Experience
  - Documentation
  - OpenAPI
  - Platform
  - SDKs
  - Rate Limiting
  - Quotas
description: >-
  Fern's customer-facing limits are expressed as plan-level metering rather than
  per-second HTTP rate limits. Public Fern surfaces — the docs site, dashboard,
  and the fern-mcp-server hosted endpoint — do not document per-request rate
  limits on their public pages, so this file captures the consumption metering
  that does exist (seats and AI credits) plus generic safe-harbor guidance for
  programmatic consumers.
headers:
  limit: ''
  remaining: ''
  reset: ''
  retryAfter: Retry-After
  policy: ''
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
  quotaExceeded: 429
  serviceUnavailable: 503
limits:
  - tier: hobby
    name: Hobby Seats
    scope: workspace
    metric: seats
    limit: 2
    timeFrame: month
    applies:
      - Fern Workspace
  - tier: hobby
    name: Hobby AI Credits
    scope: workspace
    metric: ai_credits_per_month
    limit: 250
    timeFrame: month
    applies:
      - Ask Fern
      - Fern Writer
  - tier: team
    name: Team Seats
    scope: workspace
    metric: seats
    limit: 5
    timeFrame: month
    applies:
      - Fern Workspace
  - tier: team
    name: Team AI Credits
    scope: workspace
    metric: ai_credits_per_month
    limit: 1000
    timeFrame: month
    applies:
      - Ask Fern
      - Fern Writer
  - tier: enterprise
    name: Enterprise Negotiated
    scope: contract
    metric: seats
    limit: -1
    timeFrame: month
    applies:
      - Fern Workspace
policies:
  - name: Backoff Strategy
    description: MCP and dashboard clients should retry with exponential backoff and respect any Retry-After header on 429 or 503 responses.
  - name: Fair Use
    description: Even on enterprise tiers, sustained or abusive usage that impacts shared infrastructure (e.g. the hosted MCP endpoint) may be throttled.
  - name: AI Credit Reset
    description: AI credits reset at the start of each billing cycle.
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com