Limits and quotas
Available now
Section titled “Available now”Lean v1 counts requests. Every request with a key counts as one against that key, whatever it does: a search, a tile, a preview or a GeoTIFF.
Rates and the monthly quota
Section titled “Rates and the monthly quota”| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Requests per second, per key | 50, with bursts of 100 |
| Requests per month, per key | 100,000 |
| Requests per second, whole service | 100, with bursts of 200 |
A request over the per-second limit gets 429 rate-limited with Retry-After: 1; over the monthly quota, 429 quota-exhausted. Both are problem documents. Back off and retry; for map clients, a short pause is enough.
A map view at zoom 12 loads about 20 tiles, and each pan or zoom asks for 20 to 60 new tiles at once, so 100,000 requests is roughly 5,000 map views a month. The per-second limit was set for that kind of burst.
Size caps
Section titled “Size caps”POST /v1/process runs on the same renderer as the download API. It caps the output in pixels a side and, like the download API, in values: output width × height × number of bands.
| Cap | Synchronous request | Background job |
|---|---|---|
Output pixels a side (POST /v1/process) |
2,500 | 20,000 |
| Output values | 150,000,000 | 600,000,000 |
| Values × scenes read, for a mosaic | 200,000,000 | 2,400,000,000 |
| Scenes in one mosaic | 6 | 6 |
| Time to answer | about 29 seconds (the API Gateway limit) | 5 minutes |
150 million values is about 34 km square of all 12 Sentinel-2 spectral bands at 10 m, or 134 km square of Landsat’s 7 at 30 m. A request over a cap gets 413 output-too-large with the numbers, so you can shrink the box, drop bands or coarsen the resolution, or send it as a job.
| Other limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Inline GeoTIFF response | up to 4 MB; larger outputs answer 303 with a link |
| Download links | valid for 1 hour |
| Output files and job records | deleted after 1 day |
Preview size (max_size) |
64 to 1,024 pixels on the long edge |
| Scenes per map tile | 50, least cloudy first |
| Jobs running at once, whole service | 4 |
Spending stop
Section titled “Spending stop”The service has an automatic monthly spending stop. If it trips, api.satellitedata.net stops along with tiles and downloads on the older hosts, answering 503 upstream-unavailable; search on stac.satellitedata.net keeps working. The owner can lift it.
Coming later
Section titled “Coming later”The full v1 contract replaces request counting with units, a measure of work computed from the request before any pixel is read. The formula is the Sentinel Hub processing unit: one unit is a 512 × 512 pixel output of three bands from one date at 16 bits or less, scaled by area, bands, dates and data sources, and doubled for 32-bit float output. Cache hits, errors and anonymous requests cost nothing.
Planned tiers:
| Tier | Price a month | Units a month | Units a minute | Concurrent requests | Requests a minute | Keys |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10,000 | 300 | 2 | 600 | 2 |
| Pro | $29 | 200,000 | 1,500 | 10 | 600 | 5 |
Also planned:
- Restricted mode. After the monthly units are spent a key keeps working at one concurrent request and 10% of the per-minute rate, with its own allowance (5,000 units on Free). After that,
quota-exhausteduntil the next month. - Headers.
X-Units-Spent,X-Units-Remaining,RateLimitandRateLimit-Policyon metered responses. - Hard caps on statistics and time series, and
request-too-expensivewhen a request’s units exceed the tier’s per-request maximum. - Usage report at
GET /v1/usage.
Worked numbers from the design: a 512 × 512 float32 NDVI from two bands costs 1.333 units; an uncached 256-pixel NDVI tile costs 0.167 units; a three-month search over a small box costs the 0.01 minimum.