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: Kubecost
providerId: kubecost
created: '2026-05-04'
# Provenance stamped 2026-08-11: this artifact was written by the API Evangelist
# bulk sweep dated 2026-05-04, not harvested from the provider. See roadmap#35.
method: generated
modified: '2026-05-05'
reconciled: false
tags:
  - Rate Limiting
  - Cloud Cost
  - Kubernetes
description: Kubecost's monitoring APIs (Allocation, Assets, Cloud Cost, Budget, Forecast, Savings) are
  served by the Kubecost cost-model in-cluster, so request rate is bound by the consumer's own deployment
  rather than a vendor-imposed numeric quota. Apptio does not publish per-second/per-minute API rate
  limits for Enterprise Cloud SaaS.
sources:
  - https://docs.kubecost.com/apis/monitoring-apis/api-allocation
  - https://www.apptio.com/pricing?src=kc-com
notes: No vendor-published numeric API rate limits. Consumers self-host the cost-model service; effective
  limits are governed by the deployment's own resource requests.
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
  serviceUnavailable: 503
limits:
  - name: Self-hosted cost-model
    scope: cluster
    metric: varies
    limit: 'governed by self-hosted cost-model resource limits'
  - name: Enterprise Cloud SaaS
    scope: tenant
    metric: varies
    limit: 'see vendor; not publicly documented'
policies:
  - name: ETL Caching
    description: The Allocation API is integrated with the Kubecost ETL caching layer; expensive queries
      are cached and CSV pipelines used for large clusters.
  - name: Backoff
    description: Use exponential backoff with jitter on 429/503 responses; honor Retry-After when present.
  - name: Window Selection
    description: Prefer narrower time windows and aggregated steps to reduce work in the cost-model;
      avoid overlapping concurrent queries against the same window.
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com