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: Polar
providerId: polar-sh
created: '2026-06-21'
modified: '2026-06-21'
reconciled: true
tags:
- Billing
- Payments
- Merchant of Record
- Monetization
- Rate Limiting
- Quotas
- Throttling
description: >-
  The Polar API enforces per-organization (and per-customer for portal
  endpoints) rate limits expressed as requests per minute. Production allows a
  higher ceiling than the sandbox environment, and a small number of
  unauthenticated validation endpoints (such as license-key validation) are
  limited per second. Exceeding a limit returns HTTP 429.
notes: >-
  Limits verified against the Polar API reference introduction on 2026-06-21;
  values may change. Verify in the Polar documentation at reconciliation.
sources:
- https://polar.sh/docs/api-reference/introduction
- https://polar.sh/docs
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
limits:
- name: Production Requests Per Minute
  scope: organization
  metric: requests
  limit: 500 per minute
  notes: Per organization or customer in the production environment (api.polar.sh).
- name: Sandbox Requests Per Minute
  scope: organization
  metric: requests
  limit: 100 per minute
  notes: Per organization or customer in the sandbox environment (sandbox-api.polar.sh).
- name: Unauthenticated Validation Endpoints
  scope: ip
  metric: requests
  limit: 3 per second
  notes: Applies to unauthenticated validation endpoints such as license-key validation.
policies:
- name: Environment Tiers
  description: Production grants a higher RPM ceiling than the sandbox environment.
- name: Backoff Strategy
  description: Clients should implement exponential backoff with jitter on HTTP 429 responses.
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com