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: Vincario
providerId: vincario
created: '2026-06-21'
modified: '2026-06-21'
reconciled: false
tags:
- VIN
- Vehicle Data
- Automotive
- VIN Decoder
- Rate Limiting
- Quotas
- Throttling
description: >-
  The Vincario vindecoder.eu API enforces a documented per-account throughput
  limit of 60 VIN lookups per minute. Total volume is bounded by purchased
  credits/balance rather than by a daily or monthly request cap, and invalid VINs
  are not charged. Per-endpoint throttling values beyond the 60/min decode rate
  are not separately documented and are not reconciled in this artifact.
notes: >-
  Verify the current request-per-minute rate and any per-endpoint limits on the
  Vincario API documentation during reconciliation; the credit balance, not a
  fixed time-window quota, governs total usage.
sources:
- https://vindecoder.eu/api
- https://vincario.com/blog/vin-decoder-api-pricing/
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
limits:
- name: VIN Lookups Per Minute
  scope: account
  metric: requests
  limit: 60
  notes: Documented rate of 60 VIN lookups per minute per account.
- name: Credit Balance
  scope: account
  metric: credits
  limit: see purchased balance
  notes: >-
    Total usage is bounded by remaining account credits; check via the balance
    endpoint. Invalid VINs are not charged.
policies:
- name: Pay-Per-Use Credits
  description: >-
    Usage is metered against a prepaid credit balance per service rather than a
    fixed periodic quota.
- name: Backoff Strategy
  description: >-
    Clients should implement exponential backoff with jitter and honor
    Retry-After when throttled.
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com