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: JSONPlaceholder
providerId: jsonplaceholder
created: '2026-05-29'
modified: '2026-05-29'
reconciled: true
tags:
  - Rate Limiting
  - Development
  - Fake API
description: >-
  JSONPlaceholder does not publish or document any rate-limit numbers. The
  service is a free best-effort offering that handles roughly three billion
  requests per month without per-IP or per-key throttling. CDN-level
  protections may apply at the edge but are not documented. Consumers should
  treat the service as best-effort: do not rely on it for production traffic,
  do not build dependencies on tight latency SLAs, and back off if you start
  receiving 5xx responses or your traffic is identifiably abusive. For
  guaranteed behavior, self-host json-server (the same open-source engine).
sources:
  - https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com
  - https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/guide/
  - https://github.com/typicode/json-server
responseCodes:
  serverError: 500
  notFound: 404
limits:
  - name: 'Documented rate limit'
    scope: 'IP'
    metric: 'varies'
    limit: 'none documented — best-effort public service'
    notes: >-
      typicode does not publish per-second, per-minute, or per-day request
      caps. The service is intentionally permissive for tutorials, demos, and
      classrooms.
  - name: 'Edge / CDN protection'
    scope: 'IP'
    metric: 'varies'
    limit: 'undisclosed CDN-level abuse protection may apply'
    notes: >-
      A free public service of this scale is generally fronted by a CDN that
      will throttle obviously abusive patterns (very high concurrency, bot
      traffic). The thresholds are not published.
policies:
  - name: 'Treat as best-effort'
    description: >-
      JSONPlaceholder is a free community service. Consumers should not depend
      on it for production traffic. If you need guaranteed availability or
      throughput, self-host json-server locally.
  - name: 'Back off on 5xx'
    description: >-
      If the service returns 5xx responses, apply exponential backoff with
      jitter. Do not hammer the public endpoint.
  - name: 'Avoid abuse patterns'
    description: >-
      Do not use JSONPlaceholder as a backend for a real product. Do not run
      high-concurrency load tests against the public endpoint — run them
      against a self-hosted json-server instead.
  - name: 'Writes are simulated'
    description: >-
      POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE return success-shaped responses but do not
      persist. If your client retries a write, the second response will look
      identical to the first — there is no idempotency key surface because
      there is no real persistence.