A: Hey Ahmed,

As per Eric's response:

There's no numeric limit to the number of API calls you can make, however, if you send a large number in a short time (as determined by the algorithm) they will start to slow down responses to compensate and keep the system healthy.

Your next question might be, how much does it slow down, after how many API calls? The reason we don't give those specifics is that it's dynamic, and we continue to change and optimize it, so any specific numbers would not last long, and in practice, it's not useful to you.

Why take this approach? Because as a merchant or as a developer, dealing with hard API limits is a huge pain. Instead of focusing on building the best experience for your customer, you have to deal with rate-limiting logic which is by no means straightforward. We've heard over and over again (and I've experienced it personally), that hard API rate-limiting is frustrating. You should still try to build performant integrations, of course.

As we continue to grow and improve our infrastructure, which has increased in capacity by more than 10X this year alone, we can continue making everyone's experience faster and more reliable without you needing to worry about it.

Finally, just to confirm, there is a difference in how the algorithm treats accounts with Advanced API limits and not. It's similar to Cloudflare, if you're at all familiar with how their system works, where the plan you're on determines traffic prioritization and can ultimately speed, depending on overall traffic levels, region, etc.

Check out https://status.swell.store/ to see average API response times across all stores.