03 December 2025

New tools for managing API key rate limits

You can now set a separate per-second rate limit for each API key, bringing new flexibility.

Managing and configuring API keys is perhaps the least interesting part of using a geocoding service, but it’s still something we put considerable thought into. As of a few weeks ago, there’s a new feature available to all paying customers in your Geocode Earth dashboard: You can now configure a custom per-second rate limit for each API key you’ve created.

Now, before you get too excited, there’s still an account-wide per-second limit determined by which plan you’re on, and no key (or even all keys in total) can exceed that. Stay tuned for news on that front though, as we think it’s well past time to bring more flexibility there too.

Anyway, what use is it to make one of your API keys be allowed to use fewer requests per-second than it would before? After talking with a bunch of our customers, there are some surprisingly useful answers to this question.

Limited keys for development

You can configure a “development” key with just a small portion of your account’s rate limit. We’ve all accidentally run a script in development that went a bit overboard, and with this change you can ensure your production key still has the capacity it needs to serve the traffic you really care about.

Multiple production keys

You can configure multiple production keys, each with a bit less than your total account rate-limit, and rotate through them. This can help protect your users from bot or other surges in traffic from eating up all your per-second rate limits. The internet has never been crawling with more, well, crawlers than it is today. Mitigating the effects of these crawlers is on everyone’s mind and is something many customers have asked about.

As a concrete example, if you have a 50 request per-second rate limit on your account, you could configure three production keys, each with a 40 request per-second limit. No one key can use up your entire account limit, meaning you’ve reduced the blast radius of any sort of issue: an aggressive crawler, a spike in real traffic, or that script you ran in development that ChatGPT promised you was throttled.

This works especially well if you have multiple web properties, like websites with completely separate identities, or a web app vs mobile apps on various platforms.

What’s still coming

Those are just a few simple ideas, we fully expect our customers to continue to be far more creative than we are when coming up with ways to use this functionality.

If you end up using API key limits in an interesting way, or especially if there’s something more we could add that’s useful, remember there’s no rate limit on emails to our support team.

In particular, we’re considering extending the same pattern to monthly limits, so please tell us if that’s useful enough to prioritize.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled lat/lon programming!