API usage queries

Question

Hello Dropbox team,We are planning to add a feature in our application where users can import the documents from dropbox. I have got the following questions.

* As per the plans here https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison, the limit for API calls is only for data transport.
Transfer data from your existing solutions with 1 billion included API calls per month to data transport partners.
As per the documentation https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/data-transport-limit, only upload calls are considered as data transport calls. In our feature, we will only be downloading the documents from dropbox and import to our system. Can you please confirm if there is any limit for downloading of files similar to data transport limit? I also found that download limit is specific to the user account not the developer account(https://help.dropbox.com/share/banned-links). Can you please confirm on this too?
* For choosing the files from dropbox, we have been exploring Chooser component https://www.dropbox.com/developers/chooser. This opens a new window to select the files which needs to be downloaded. Is there an option to load the same chooser in an iframe inside our application? Please let me know.

Greg-DB · Accepted Answer

1. As you found, there is a specific limit for uploads to some Dropbox Business team plans of "1 billion API calls/month" for "data transport" . This is a limit on the number of upload API calls that can be made per team per month, for certain Dropbox Business team plans only. This only applies to upload calls, and not other types of calls such as download.

Additionally though, the Dropbox API does have a general rate limiting system that applies to all account types and calls, including downloads, though we don't have specific rate numbers documented for that.

Apps should be written to handle these rate limit responses automatically. Also note that not all responses with a 429 or 503 status code indicate explicit rate limiting, but in any case that you get a response with 429 or 503 status code the best practice is to retry the request, respecting the Retry-After header if given in the response, or using an exponential back-off, if not. I recommend referring to the error documentation and Error Handling Guide for more information.

And yes, these limits operate per-account. Note that the particular help center article you linked to is referring to a limit on traffic for shared links in particular, which is separate from the API call rate limits. The shared links traffic limit operates on the amount of traffic occurring on a particular account's links, while the API rate limiting system operates on the number of API calls per time window for an account connected to an app.

2. No, there isn't an iframe option available for the Chooser. You can find all of the available options on the Chooser documentation page that you linked to.