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Rate limits and query cost

Current status​

The public GraphQL APIs do not currently enforce a published per-key rate limit, and they do not return rate-limit headers or an extensions.cost budget on responses. There is no documented max query depth or complexity today. If and when limits are introduced, they will be documented here and announced in the changelog before enforcement.

This does not mean "unlimited" — treat the platform as a shared service and design for back-pressure:

  • Back off on errors. On INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR or a transport failure, retry with exponential backoff and jitter. Do not tight-loop retry.
  • Do not blind-retry economy mutations. createCheckout and similar mutations are not idempotent yet, so an aggressive retry can double-create. See Error codes.
  • Batch reads with pagination (see Pagination) instead of many tiny requests.

Realtime (UDP) cost model​

The realtime path is best-effort UDP and is governed by a spatial fan-out model rather than a request quota:

  • Each spatial message carries a distance (0–8 chunks, Chebyshev) and a decayRate (0–5) that together bound how far and how often it replicates to nearby clients. Choose the smallest distance and an appropriate decayRate for your gameplay to limit amplification. See Wire formats for the decay algorithms.
  • The server coalesces outbound messages into bundles (~1 ms window), so a client should expect batched delivery and parse MESSAGE_BUNDLEs.
  • sequenceNumber is a uint8 that wraps at 255 and is correlation only — it is not a flow-control or idempotency mechanism.

Quotas (a different concept)​

Per-org/app usage quotas (e.g. metered service limits) are a billing/entitlement concept, not a transport rate limit. Query the effective quota for a metric with the Management API effectiveQuota, and see Shared environment & billing. Exceeding a quota surfaces as a quota error on the affected operation, not as a transport 429.

One shaping cap does behave like a rate limit and is worth knowing about: an unfunded free app's egress is soft-capped at roughly 1 MB/s. Funding the org wallet or enabling auto-billing lifts it — buying a capacity reservation does not. Once an organization can be charged, CK does not rate-limit its egress, and spend is bounded by the caps you set rather than by a throughput ceiling.