Rate limits and etiquette on the X API

Stay inside the limits and your tool keeps working. Ignore them and you’ll get 429s.

Read the headers

Every response carries your budget. Watch these and back off before you hit zero:

x-rate-limit-limit:     300
x-rate-limit-remaining: 12
x-rate-limit-reset:     1730500000   // unix seconds

Exponential backoff

async function withBackoff(fn, tries = 5){
  for (let i = 0; i < tries; i++){
    const r = await fn();
    if (r.status !== 429) return r;
    await sleep(2 ** i * 1000);   // 1s, 2s, 4s…
  }
}

Cache aggressively. Most “rate limit” problems are really “requesting the same data too often” problems.