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API Rate Limits and Restrictions for Dropbox Plans

Haitham1992

I am currently integrating Dropbox with a software solution for my customers and would like to better understand the API rate limits and usage restrictions for different Dropbox plans. While I have reviewed the documentation, I found that the specific limitations and restrictions for each plan, including Dropbox Business and Enterprise, are not fully clear.

In particular, I am seeking clarification on the following:

The specific API rate limits (requests per hour) for individual accounts, Dropbox Business accounts, and Dropbox Enterprise accounts.
Any additional limitations or restrictions that apply to each plan, such as file upload limits, shared link generation, and large file handling.
Whether there are options to increase the rate limits for specific use cases, such as high-traffic applications or enterprise-level operations.

Any additional insights or documentation you could provide on API usage and best practices for scaling would be greatly appreciated. Understanding these limitations is crucial for our planning and ensuring that we provide the best experience for our users.

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Comments

Greg-DB

The Dropbox API does have a general rate limiting system that applies to all account types, but we don't have specific rate numbers to share for that, and we cannot increase the limits for any particular app, user, or team. 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.

Additionally, there is a specific limit for uploads to some Dropbox team plans of "1 billion API calls/month" for "data transport" noted here. This is a limit on the number of upload API calls that can be made per team per month, for certain Dropbox team plans only. Note that this only applies to upload calls, and not other types of calls. You can find more information on this limit in the developer documentation here.

There are also some other types of limits to be aware of: