My team has been working with Airtable’s REST API to handle our staff information management. I noticed that their documentation mentions the API is limited to 5 requests per second for each base.
I’m wondering if purchasing a premium subscription like Pro or Enterprise would give us higher API request limits? Are there any other methods to get more API calls per second?
We’re hitting the current limit pretty often and it’s slowing down our workflow. Any suggestions would be helpful!
Been dealing with Airtable API limits for years - upgrading your plan won’t help with rate limiting. That 5 requests per second limit stays the same no matter what plan you’re on.
What works for me is batching requests and queuing them on the client side. Don’t fire off individual API calls - batch your operations and space them out.
Use their batch endpoints when you can. You can update multiple records in one API call instead of hitting the API separately for each record.
Still hitting walls after optimizing? Try webhooks for real-time updates instead of polling, or migrate to a platform with higher rate limits.
Unfortunately, rate limits are the same across all Airtable plans. But I’ve found some workarounds that really helped when I hit these bottlenecks. First, use exponential backoff - when you hit the limit, wait longer before each retry. Stops your requests from getting stuck in endless loops. Second, restructure your data flow to rely less on the API. I started caching frequently used data locally and only sync changes every so often instead of making real-time calls for everything. If you’re doing lots of reads, check out Airtable’s sync tables or their GraphQL API - it’s way more efficient for complex queries. Bottom line: reduce your total API calls instead of trying to increase the limit.