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rate_limited

Your monthly quota of live registry calls has been exhausted.

HTTP 429 · Too Many Requests

Example response

{
  "error": {
    "code": "rate_limited",
    "message": "Monthly quota of 500 exceeded. Resets 2026-05-01T00:00:00Z."
  },
  "meta": {
    "request_id": "a1b2c3d4-...",
    "latency_ms": 0
  }
}

Headers on this response:

X-RateLimit-Limit: 500
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 0
X-RateLimit-Reset: 1746057600
Retry-After: 1382400

What happened

Every plan has a monthly quota of live registry calls. Cache hits are free and don't count. When the quota is exhausted, all further requests that would require a registry call are rejected with 429 until the quota resets on the 1st of the next month.

How to fix

  1. Check X-RateLimit-Remaining on every response to track remaining quota before hitting the limit.
  2. Respect Retry-After. It tells you the exact seconds until reset. Don't retry before then.
  3. Use cache=false sparingly. Bypassing cache forces a live call and counts quota even if the same number was recently validated.
  4. Upgrade your plan for a higher monthly quota.
  5. Cache validation results on your side (e.g. in your database) to avoid re-validating the same VAT numbers.

Common mistakes

  • Busy-retrying on 429: retrying immediately wastes calls and won't succeed. Respect Retry-After.
  • Not monitoring X-RateLimit-Remaining: quota exhaustion mid-month is avoidable with monitoring.
  • Re-validating known customers on every checkout: store the validation result in your database with a timestamp. Re-validate only when the stored result is older than your compliance requirement (e.g. 30 days).
  • Bypassing cache unnecessarily: cache=false is for audited compliance workflows, not default usage.

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