Understanding rate limits and their impact on API usage

We apply rate limits to activity from machine users interacting with the Plain API. The default rate limit depends on the plan you're on.

Plan	Rate limit
Launch & Foundation	450 requests/minute
Grow & Horizon	600 requests/minute
Scale & Frontier	1000 requests/minute

Activity from within the Plain app is exempt from these rate limits.

Impact of hitting rate limits

When you've reached your rate limit quota, you'll receive response headers similar to the following from our API:


  HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
  Content-Type: application/json
  x-ratelimit-limit: 450
  x-ratelimit-remaining: 0
  x-ratelimit-reset: 2026-01-06T15:30:00.000Z

x-ratelimit-limit the limit for your workspace
x-ratelimit-remaining how many requests you have left
x-ratelimit-reset when the limit resets

You can calculate retry-after using the the timestamp provided by the x-ratelimit-reset header.