You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
dropbox API call upload limits! confirming some things and feedback
EDIT2 (2021): I posted a follow up question as a reply here. Seeking clarification around the different API limits between different types of Dropbox account and the very confusing plans comparison ...
Hi all
I know this is a very old thread but just wanted to update it as I came across is when I performed a search.
Dropbox has now increased in API limits to 1 Billion calls on it's business teams.
https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison
This should be more than enough to get all your data into Dropbox as fast as possible.
I still see this old post show up in Google searches about Dropbox's API limits. Was trying to answer a question and found myself here.
I'd like some clarification about what the API limits for different Dropbox accounts are. This page says only business accounts have a Data Transport limit. However I noticed that the Dropbox Plans page seems to say that individual accounts have more restricted API access? Not just Data Transport but other types of API access too.
See this screenshot:
The_Captain the different plan comparison page you linked to shows the same thing.
Even more confusing, that plans page seems to say that only business accounts have unlimited access to "productivity platform partners". Is that true? I haven't seen any issues with people with Free accounts using our Dropbox API app. Is there actually any way that individual accounts are MORE limited in API access than Business accounts? Besides the obvious situation where Business accounts have access to Business API endpoints that aren't relevant to Individual accounts. (security platform partners)
Can someone help me make sense of the plans comparison page and clarify what the differences in API access between the various plans are? I think the plans page is just wrong or I'm really misunderstanding something.
Thanks
- Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
The Dropbox API does have a general rate limiting system that applies to all account types and API calls, but I don't have any specific numbers to share for that, such as the maximum number of calls. This system does not have a strict maximum number exactly, but rather operates on the basis of the rate of calls, i.e., the number of calls per time period per user. Also note that not all 429s and 503s indicate explicit rate limiting, but in any case that you get a 429 or 503 the best practice is to retry the request, respecting the Retry-After header if given in the response, or using an exponential back-off, if not. I recommend referring to the error documentation and Error Handling Guide, as well as the Performance Guide for more information.
In addition to that general limit though, there is also a specific limit for upload calls to some Dropbox Business team plans of "1 billion API calls/month" for "data transport" noted here. This is a limit on the number of upload API calls that can be made per team per month, for certain Dropbox Business team plans only. This only applies to upload calls, and not other types of calls. You can find more information on this limit in the developer documentation here.Additionally, as you mentioned, some types of apps (sometimes called "team-linked") can only be linked to teams, not individual accounts, so they can't be accessed by non-team accounts at all, since they offer functionality that only applies to teams. "User-linked" apps can be connected to any account type.
I see that some of these rows could be more clearly described/labeled on that page, so I'll ask the team to see if we can clarify that somehow.
Greg-DB thank you very much for the detailed replied.
Also I just noticed that my screenshot from before is now out of date and the current page shows all plans as having unlimited access to productivity apps! This is far less confusing and maps to my understanding of reality.The '1 billion API calls/month' part is still a bit odd... since for the non-business plans there's no limit on data transport partner API calls. But it is technically correct (the best kind) that the business plans have a 1 billion call limit and the others don't! Definitely not as confusing as the other thing that's now fixed. (and it seems meaningless to individual users anyway since to even hit a billion/month that'd require 385/requests a second for 30 days and individual users/apps would hit another more general rate limit long before that)
So cool seeing feedback on a product like Dropbox actually having an effect on the world. (if it was me at all, that is)
Thanks again.
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