API rate limits

Our public API is a service accessible to all Sendinblue users, we want to provide the best possible experience when you integrate to our platform. In order to ensure this we have put in place some limits to the number of requests that can be executed in a period of time.

General Rate Limiting

Our endpoint list has been optimised in such way that we ensure the critical routes can efficiently handle as many requests as possible without compromising stability. This translates to the following numbers:

RPS: HTTP requests per second
RPM: HTTP requests per minute
RPH: HTTP requests per hour

How to prevent my API requests from being rejected ?

If you execute request bursts in a shorter timeframe other than the specified above you might get as a result a 429 status code or "Too many requests". This means you're hitting the limit for the number of requests allowed in a single endpoint. Here are some recommendations on how to prevent this error from appearing:

1- Make sure you properly calculate your allowance per minute. You need to send your bulk requests equally distributed through the minute, this means that you should not query the API all at once. Let's say you intend to send 1000 emails through the endpoint POST /v3/smtp/email , you want to make sure you execute (as a maximum) the endpoint ~1000 times every second.
~1000 RPS x 60 seconds = ~60,000 RPM.
If you wish to increase the volume, you need an Enterprise account. You can contact here our Sales team.

2- If you would like to fetch the statistics, you may use the webhooks here.

Extended Rate Limit Add-On

If you have an enterprise account and you require more throughput in your API operations it's possible to request the rate limit add-on on top of the general rate limit policy.

If your integrations require an increase rate limit quota please reach out to our customer service

Hourly quota for email sending

To help new transactional senders build a positive reputation over time, we apply an hourly sending bandwidth for accounts using our shared IPs.

Transactional senders who are using our shared IPs will start with the capacity of sending 100 emails per hour. This bandwidth will increase or decrease automatically based on your engagement metrics and sending volume.

Senders who wish to send non-transactional materials (such as marketing emails) through the SMTP platform may only do so by using a dedicated IP.

You can learn more about the hourly quota on this help article