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: Ko-fi
providerId: ko-fi
created: '2026-07-05'
modified: '2026-07-05'
reconciled: false
tags:
- Creator Economy
- Webhooks
- Payments
- Rate Limiting
description: >-
  Ko-fi's only developer surface is an outbound payment webhook, so traditional
  request-rate limits do not apply - your service does not call Ko-fi. Ko-fi
  POSTs a notification to your configured URL only when a payment happens, so the
  effective "rate" is simply your payment volume. Ko-fi does not publish numeric
  webhook delivery limits, retry counts, or timeout values. Because there is no
  public REST API, there are no per-account or per-endpoint request quotas to
  document.
notes: >-
  Ko-fi does not document webhook retry behavior; treat delivery as
  at-most-once and make your receiver idempotent using kofi_transaction_id or
  message_id. No numeric limits are published as of the review date.
sources:
- https://help.ko-fi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004162298-Does-Ko-fi-have-an-API-or-webhook
- https://ko-fi.com/manage/webhooks
responseCodes:
  throttled: not applicable (inbound webhook; you return 200 to Ko-fi)
limits:
- name: Payment Webhook Delivery
  scope: account
  metric: events
  limit: event-driven (one POST per payment)
  notes: Ko-fi POSTs to your URL only when a payment occurs; no fixed numeric cap is published.
- name: Public REST API Requests
  scope: account
  metric: requests
  limit: not applicable
  notes: Ko-fi does not expose a public REST API, so there is no outbound request quota.
policies:
- name: Idempotency
  description: >-
    Ko-fi may deliver a webhook and does not document retry semantics; dedupe on
    kofi_transaction_id or message_id so re-delivered events are processed once.
- name: Verification
  description: >-
    Reject any webhook whose verification_token does not match the token on your
    Ko-fi webhooks page before doing any processing.
- name: Fast Acknowledgement
  description: >-
    Return an HTTP 200 quickly and offload heavy work to a background job so the
    webhook POST does not time out.
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com