Rate Limits

🛠️

Public Beta Feature

This documentation covers a feature currently in Public Beta. Access is available to anyone interested in building personalized experiences for their end-users.

This feature is subject to the Personalization API (Self-Service) Public Beta End user License Agreement 📄.

Overview

Foursquare rate limits any application making authenticated requests on a per hour per OAuth token basis. Please refer to the Rate Limit Per Endpoint Resource table below.

As an example, if your application has 3 connected users, it could make at most 500 requests on behalf of the each connected user, for a total of 1,500 authenticated requests per hour.

Please note that rate limits are, in general, not per endpoint, but per top-level endpoint resource or group. For example, if you make 250 requests to venues/search and 250 requests to venues/explore, you would have exhausted your venues/_ rate limits for that hour; however, you would still have 500 requests left for tips/_.

Generally rate limits follow the rules above; however, some endpoints may have different limits due to security or other considerations. Please refer to the Rate Limit Exceptions table below.

For the most current and accurate rate limit usage information for a particular request type, inspect the X-RateLimit-Remaining and X-RateLimit-Limit HTTP headers of API responses.

If you are currently over limits, our API will return a 403 error, and the response object returned by our API will be empty. We will also include a X-RateLimit-Reset header in the response, which is a timestamp that corresponds to when your rate limits will reset.

Rate Limit Per Endpoint Resource

The following table includes the rate limits per managed user OAuth token.

Endpoint ResourceRate Limit (per OAuth Token)
Checkins500
Lists1000
Photos500
Search500
Tips500
Users500
Venues500

The following table includes the rate limits per Developer Service API Key.

Endpoint ResourceRate Limit (per Service Key)
User Management3600

Rate Limit Exceptions

The following table includes rate limit exceptions for specific endpoints.

EndpointRate Limit (per OAuth Token)
Search Autocomplete2000
POST Endpoints500
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