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: SWAPI
providerId: swapi
created: '2026-05-29'
modified: '2026-05-29'
tags:
  - Star Wars
  - Open Source
  - Public API
  - Rate Limiting
description: >-
  SWAPI does not publish documented hard rate limits. The swapi.dev and swapi.tech
  mirrors are community-funded, so consumers are asked to be polite — cache aggressively,
  avoid tight scraping loops, and respect 429 / 503 responses if they ever surface.
  This file captures the polite-use convention, not a contractual limit.
headers:
  limit: null
  remaining: null
  reset: null
  retryAfter: Retry-After
  policy: null
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
  quotaExceeded: 429
  serviceUnavailable: 503
limits:
  - tier: free
    name: Polite-Use Convention (Undocumented)
    scope: ip
    metric: requests_per_minute
    limit: null
    burst: null
    timeFrame: minute
    applies:
      - SWAPI REST API (swapi.dev)
      - SWAPI REST API (swapi.tech)
    notes: >-
      No documented numeric limit. Community guidance is to cache responses
      (the dataset is effectively static) and avoid sustained traffic above
      a few requests per second.
recovery:
  strategy: exponential-backoff
  initialDelaySeconds: 1
  maxDelaySeconds: 60
  honorRetryAfter: true
caching:
  recommendation: aggressive
  notes: >-
    The SWAPI dataset has not changed materially since 2014. Clients should
    treat responses as immutable for at least 24 hours and persist them locally
    for repeated lookups.