Rate limits

Rate limiting in the Order API is primarily about being a good citizen toward Monta. Monta enforces traffic ceilings over short, medium, and daily windows. Chargee tracks usage against those ceilings (with a safety margin) and refuses or short-circuits work when the shared budget is gone.

Why this exists

Every create, sync, import page, passthrough read, and background sync tick consumes Monta capacity. Without a coordinated budget, a noisy importer or an aggressive poller could starve interactive traffic — or trip Monta’s own limits in a less controlled way. Chargee therefore meters outbound Monta calls centrally for the deployment.

There is no separate, documented per-client “Order API requests per minute” layer beyond that Monta-oriented budget today. In practice, staying within Monta’s windows through Chargee is the constraint that matters.

What “budget exhausted” feels like

When there is not enough remaining capacity for the next warehouse call, Chargee stops. Interactive sync typically fails with a too-many-requests style error so you can retry later. Long jobs such as import may stop early and tell you they halted because of rate limiting, rather than failing the entire HTTP request as a hard error. You can resume later; the design assumes backfill is interruptible.

Background sync also yields when the budget is tight, so automatic freshness does not burn the last slots needed for user-driven work — though in heavy periods both can contend for the same pool.

Cost of common actions (conceptually)

Creating an order costs one warehouse call. Syncing one order costs two (detail plus serials). Reading Monta directly costs one per read. Import costs list pages plus two calls for each order that still needs a full pull. Those multipliers are why “sync everything every few seconds” or “import the whole catalog in one impatient loop” collides with limits quickly.

Sensible integrator behavior

Do not poll sync in a tight loop. Refresh product UIs from local order data. Sync when an operator or workflow needs an explicit refresh. Cap large imports so interactive traffic still has headroom. When you are told to wait, wait — then retry with backoff. If you foresee a one-time historical flood, coordinate with Chargee so capacity expectations are shared.

Rate limits are not a punishment; they are how Chargee keeps warehouse access predictable for every merchant on the platform.