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: Studio Ghibli API
providerId: studio-ghibli
created: '2026-05-29'
modified: '2026-05-29'
reconciled: true
tags:
  - Rate Limiting
  - Public API
  - Free
  - Anime
description: >-
  The community-built Studio Ghibli API (https://github.com/janaipakos/ghibliapi)
  publishes no per-key, per-IP, or per-account rate limits. The canonical instance
  is anonymous, free, and bounded only by the hosting provider's underlying limits
  — historically Heroku's free dyno, now Vercel's serverless function quotas.
  Consumers should treat the public deployment as best-effort and self-host (the
  repo is MIT-licensed) for any production workload. No throttling headers are
  documented; the OpenAPI source declares 400 and 404 as the only documented
  error responses.
sources:
  - https://github.com/janaipakos/ghibliapi
  - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/janaipakos/ghibliapi/master/public/swagger.yaml
  - https://ghibliapi.vercel.app
responseCodes:
  badRequest: 400
  notFound: 404
limits:
  - name: Public deployment — no documented limits
    scope: IP
    metric: varies
    limit: 'no documented per-key or per-IP rate limit; bounded only by the hosting provider (Vercel) serverless function quota'
    notes: The API publishes neither numeric request-rate limits nor RateLimit-* headers. For guaranteed availability fork the MIT-licensed repo and self-host.
policies:
  - name: Best-effort public availability
    description: The community instance at ghibliapi.vercel.app is community-operated and offers no SLA. Heavy or production workloads should self-host.
  - name: Backoff on transient failures
    description: Treat 5xx responses as transient hosting issues; apply exponential backoff before retrying.
  - name: Cache aggressively
    description: All five collections are read-only and update extremely rarely — cache responses at the consumer for hours or days.
  - name: Self-host for production
    description: The repo (janaipakos/ghibliapi, MIT) can be forked and deployed to any Node host. The canonical Vercel instance should not be relied on as critical infrastructure.