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: Kanye REST
providerId: kanye-rest
created: '2026-05-29'
modified: '2026-05-29'
reconciled: false

tags:
  - Rate Limiting
  - Personality
  - Quotes
  - Open Source
  - Cloudflare Workers

description: >-
  Kanye REST is a free, unauthenticated single-purpose API hosted on
  Cloudflare Workers. The maintainer does not publish any per-key, per-IP,
  or per-account request-rate limits in the project README or on the
  kanye.rest landing page. Because the service runs on the Cloudflare
  Workers Free plan, traffic is subject to Cloudflare's underlying
  platform protections (Workers daily request caps, sub-request limits,
  and CDN-edge DDoS / abuse mitigation), but these are not surfaced as
  documented API contracts. Consumers should treat the API as best-effort
  and apply client-side throttling, caching, and exponential backoff.

sources:
  - https://kanye.rest
  - https://github.com/ajzbc/kanye.rest
  - https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/

responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
  serverError: 500

limits:
  - name: Documented per-key request rate
    scope: key
    metric: requests_per_second
    limit: 'not documented — service does not publish per-key or per-account rate limits'
    notes: >-
      The provider does not publish numeric request-rate limits. Plan for
      best-effort access and degrade gracefully.

  - name: Platform-level Cloudflare Workers Free plan caps
    scope: account
    metric: varies
    limit: 'see https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/'
    notes: >-
      Underlying runtime is Cloudflare Workers (Free plan). The Cloudflare
      platform applies its own daily request caps, sub-request limits, CPU
      time limits, and edge abuse-mitigation policies that effectively
      bound throughput regardless of the absence of provider-defined
      limits.

  - name: Edge DDoS / abuse mitigation
    scope: IP
    metric: varies
    limit: 'enforced opaquely by Cloudflare edge'
    notes: >-
      Excessive request rates from a single source IP may trigger
      Cloudflare's standard bot / DDoS protection (challenge pages, 429s,
      or temporary blocks) independently of any provider-defined limit.

policies:
  - name: Apply client-side throttling
    description: >-
      Because no published limits exist, consumers should self-throttle
      (e.g. 1 request per second per client) and cache the /quotes
      response rather than refetching the full collection per request.

  - name: Use exponential backoff on 429 / 5xx
    description: >-
      On HTTP 429 or 5xx responses, back off exponentially before
      retrying. The API has no Retry-After header and no remaining-budget
      header to consult, so blind backoff is the safest strategy.

  - name: Prefer /quotes for bulk usage
    description: >-
      If a consumer needs many quotes, call GET /quotes once and sample
      locally rather than calling GET / repeatedly. This reduces edge
      load and avoids triggering Cloudflare's per-IP mitigations.

  - name: No authentication, no per-key quota
    description: >-
      The service does not issue API keys, so all consumers share the
      same anonymous bucket from the perspective of the upstream edge.