Stellar API Rate Limits Explained: How to Choose the Right Plan for Your App

The public Stellar Horizon endpoint is free — until you hit the rate limit. Then your app gets HTTP 429 responses, users see loading spinners, and you realize that "free" has a cost.

How Rate Limiting Works

The public Horizon endpoint (horizon.stellar.org) limits to roughly 100-200 requests per minute per IP. No API key, no account — just IP-based limits.

What 100 Requests Per Minute Gets You

Loading one account page (balances + transactions + operations): 4 requests

Refreshing a dashboard every 30 seconds: 8 requests/minute

Monitoring 10 accounts: 40+ requests/minute

A single user with a moderately complex dashboard consumes half your limit. Two concurrent users and you are hitting 429s.

Usage Patterns by Scale

Scale	Requests/min	Monthly	Rate Limit Risk
Hobby	10-30	~30K	Low
Startup/MVP	50-500	150K-1.5M	Moderate-High
Production	500-5,000	1.5M-15M	Guaranteed
Enterprise	5,000-50,000	15M-150M	Need dedicated infra

Strategies to Reduce API Calls

1. Caching

Data Type	Cache TTL
Account balances	5-10 seconds
Fee stats	30 seconds
Asset info	5 minutes
Ledger history	Forever

2. Batch Requests

Use account-level endpoints instead of per-transaction queries:

# Instead of 10 requests (one per transaction):
GET /transactions/{hash}/operations (x10)

# Use 1 request:
GET /accounts/{id}/operations?limit=200&order=desc

3. Use Cursors

Track the cursor from your last request and only fetch new records:

GET /accounts/{id}/payments?cursor={saved_cursor}&order=asc

4. Reduce Polling Frequency

5-10 second intervals are usually sufficient. Your dashboard does not need to refresh every second.

Choosing a Plan

Tier	Requests/month	Rate Limit	Best For
Free	10,000	60/min	Learning, prototyping
Starter	100K-500K	200-500/min	MVPs, small production
Professional	1M-10M	1K-5K/min	Production apps
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Exchanges, institutions

The Real Cost Calculation

Engineer time debugging rate limits costs $50-150/hour. Infrastructure management for self-hosted nodes costs 10-20 hours/month. A $25-99/month managed API is dramatically cheaper.

[Pricing](/pricing): Compare tiers

[API Documentation](/docs): Complete endpoint reference

[Sign Up](/auth/signup): Start free, no credit card required

*Stop hitting rate limits. LumenQuery provides managed Horizon API and Soroban RPC with generous rate limits. Start free, scale when you need to.*