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 page.

EDIT:  This is one of the top google results for \"Dropbox API limit\", so I'm updating this!

Since my original post, Dropbox has raised the \"Data Transport Limit\" from 25,000 calls per month to 1,000,000 per month! This is cited on Dropbox's plan comparison page here.  The official DropBox API limit docs don't mention it yet.  Another recent improvment is that the \"/team/features/get_values\" API endpoint returns the API limit for that business account. It doesn't tell you how much has already been used though.

Other observations: Free/Plus/Pro Dropbox accounts don't have any API limits at all. It's only when you have a business account shared among team members that this limit comes into play.  

Also: The 1,000,000 API call limit seems to only apply to \"Data Transport Partners\" apps and not \"Security Platform\" or \"Productivity Platform\" apps. However it seems to work like a whitelist so by default it'll apply to your app. But if you're a legit Dropbox app that's popular with business users but you're not providing \"Data Transport\", I think you can contact Dropbox and they'll change it so your app doesn't affect the user's data transport API limit. To do this try joing the \"Technology Partner Program\". (but only if you're not doing data-transport heavy stuff. Like a doc editor or something).

Greg-DB  Any chance we could get confirmation that non-data transport apps can apply to be exempt from the limit? Is becoming a \"Technology Partner\" app the right way to do that, or is there another way? If I'm totally wrong I'll delete this.

Thanks!! Good job on Dropbox for having a forum. It's so rare to see that these days but they can be quite helpful.

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We're adding dropbox upload/download to our app....I don't really use dropbox myself so help me figure all of this out. 

Reading around the Dropbox website says that apps that connect to free or indivudal users have no API limit, but apps that connect to business users have a 25k limit for file upload calls? It's weird that this limit is only for your customers that already pay you the most.

Also since it's an API limit and not a byte limit, that means when uploading files in hunks I want to use the biggest hunk size possible to reduce the API calls?  Is it then good advice to upload all files smaller than 100MB with the one shot uploader, and use the piece by piece uploader for larger files?

smaller hunk sizes are nicer for reliability/efficency, so it bad I have to compromise that for this API limit.    Uploading in small hunks is much nicer on phones that have bad connections that come in and out but this pressues us not to use it.  Also this makes me think that something like an auto-save feature that saves your files to Dropbox every 60 seconds is a bad idea since that also eats up API calls.

I really think the limit should be a total size limit or # of files updated limit to avoid this weird pressure on people making apps.  No reason someone uploading a 1GB file in 1MB hunks should have to cost a company 1000 api calls (4% of their entire total combined API limit for every person...for a team of 50 they only get 500 api upload calls per users).  Just count the file updates or bytes uploaded instead.

I'm just worried business users will not want to use our app if we hurt their limit too much or worse than that the owners of the business accounts will ban all individual apps.

Can the fine people of DROPBOX clarify what the situation with all this is and put up guides and best practice advice? I didn't see the 25000k limit anywhere on the developer docs or developer blog post but knew to research it from other people complaining.  The data ingress guide says to back off and retry but I've seen reports of people hitting this on twitter and sounds like you have to back until the next month to get past the limit lol.  Really weird that none of the technical content mentions this limit anywhere at all, just business stuff.

Maybe all the businesses are still on the old plans for now and so they don't care, but in the future more and more will have this new limit which seems like it'll hurt developers. Once business users start hitting this limit or get close to it then larger teams with ~50+ people will want to prevent their users from linking individual apps like ours. Is it a good idea to start advertising that we're \"optimized\" to minimize our app's API upload calls? (of course optimized to limit API calls actually means unoptimizing for efficient phone uploads)

Help me understand why app makers shouldn't be worried? Are you confident this won't hurt your API ecosytem?

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 page.

EDIT:  This is one of the top google results for \"Dropbox API limit\", so I'm updating this!

Since my original post, Dropbox has raised the \"Data Transport Limit\" from 25,000 calls per month to 1,000,000 per month! This is cited on Dropbox's plan comparison page here.  The official DropBox API limit docs don't mention it yet.  Another recent improvment is that the \"/team/features/get_values\" API endpoint returns the API limit for that business account. It doesn't tell you how much has already been used though.

Other observations: Free/Plus/Pro Dropbox accounts don't have any API limits at all. It's only when you have a business account shared among team members that this limit comes into play.  

Also: The 1,000,000 API call limit seems to only apply to \"Data Transport Partners\" apps and not \"Security Platform\" or \"Productivity Platform\" apps. However it seems to work like a whitelist so by default it'll apply to your app. But if you're a legit Dropbox app that's popular with business users but you're not providing \"Data Transport\", I think you can contact Dropbox and they'll change it so your app doesn't affect the user's data transport API limit. To do this try joing the \"Technology Partner Program\". (but only if you're not doing data-transport heavy stuff. Like a doc editor or something).

  Any chance we could get confirmation that non-data transport apps can apply to be exempt from the limit? Is becoming a \"Technology Partner\" app the right way to do that, or is there another way? If I'm totally wrong I'll delete this.

Thanks!! Good job on Dropbox for having a forum. It's so rare to see that these days but they can be quite helpful.

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=====================original post below=====================
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We're adding dropbox upload/download to our app....I don't really use dropbox myself so help me figure all of this out. 

Reading around the Dropbox website says that apps that connect to free or indivudal users have no API limit, but apps that connect to business users have a 25k limit for file upload calls? It's weird that this limit is only for your customers that already pay you the most.

Also since it's an API limit and not a byte limit, that means when uploading files in hunks I want to use the biggest hunk size possible to reduce the API calls?  Is it then good advice to upload all files smaller than 100MB with the one shot uploader, and use the piece by piece uploader for larger files?

smaller hunk sizes are nicer for reliability/efficency, so it bad I have to compromise that for this API limit.    Uploading in small hunks is much nicer on phones that have bad connections that come in and out but this pressues us not to use it.  Also this makes me think that something like an auto-save feature that saves your files to Dropbox every 60 seconds is a bad idea since that also eats up API calls.

I really think the limit should be a total size limit or # of files updated limit to avoid this weird pressure on people making apps.  No reason someone uploading a 1GB file in 1MB hunks should have to cost a company 1000 api calls (4% of their entire total combined API limit for every person...for a team of 50 they only get 500 api upload calls per users).  Just count the file updates or bytes uploaded instead.

I'm just worried business users will not want to use our app if we hurt their limit too much or worse than that the owners of the business accounts will ban all individual apps.

Can the fine people of DROPBOX clarify what the situation with all this is and put up guides and best practice advice? I didn't see the 25000k limit anywhere on the developer docs or developer blog post but knew to research it from other people complaining.  The data ingress guide says to back off and retry but I've seen reports of people hitting this on twitter and sounds like you have to back until the next month to get past the limit lol.  Really weird that none of the technical content mentions this limit anywhere at all, just business stuff.

Maybe all the businesses are still on the old plans for now and so they don't care, but in the future more and more will have this new limit which seems like it'll hurt developers. Once business users start hitting this limit or get close to it then larger teams with ~50+ people will want to prevent their users from linking individual apps like ours. Is it a good idea to start advertising that we're \"optimized\" to minimize our app's API upload calls? (of course optimized to limit API calls actually means unoptimizing for efficient phone uploads)

Help me understand why app makers shouldn't be worried? Are you confident this won't hurt your API ecosytem?

Thanks for writing this up! We appreciate the time and detail.

Yes, while the Dropbox API has a general rate limiting system (meant to prevent abuse), you're correct that (some) Business plans additionally have a 25k per team per month API limit on upload calls. This does not apply to any individual plans. It only applies to certain Business plans, because the quote and pricing works differently for those, and anyone interested in Business plans can talk to sales about the different options in order to find one that fits their needs.

And yes, since this is based on the number of calls, and not chunk/file size, you can optimize this, balanced with efficiency, as you described.

Since this depends on the Business plan, it is documented in the plan comparison here:

https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison

There's also information here about the migration for old plans:

https://www.dropbox.com/help/business/new-plans

We don't have a list of these apps available to see which are affected, but when the team admin or member is prompted to decide whether or not to connect an app to their account, the app authorization page will show a warning if the app would consume the upload API call limit. If it doesn't show the warning, it will not consume it.

If you're interested in a potential partnership, you can contact the business development team here:

https://www.dropbox.com/contact_bizdev

Anyway, thanks so much for the detailed feedback! I can't tell you how to market your app of course, nor can I speak on behalf of Dropbox management, but I'll pass this along to the team as requests for more documentation, and a change to how this is implemented.

Is there a way to tell through the DropBox web interface, either from the regular content browser or the admin console, how much of your upload API quota has been consumed? If not, any other way? Reason being we'd like to use Duplicati backup but received the warning you refer to above.

I'm a little irked that once again an \"unlimited\" offer turns out on closer inspection to have limits lurking beneath the surface, but that's obviously beyond your control.

CatalystCSLtd Team admins can check their team's current upload API usage here:

https://www.dropbox.com/team/admin/billing/manage

Note that if the team is currently on an unlimited plan, that number will not be updated.

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.

thelwang Thanks for detailed edit to your post!

To confirm, yes, by default API apps will consume the data transport limit of teams subject to the limit. Partners can request an exemption from this for their app(s) by first applying for and joining the Dropbox Technology Partner program.

s

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Greg-DB  escribió:
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thelwang Thanks for detailed edit to your post!

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To confirm, yes, by default API apps will consume the data transport limit of teams subject to the limit. Partners can request an exemption from this for their app(s) by first applying for and joining the Dropbox Technology Partner program.

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Thanks. Most of our clients moved to another vendor because they don't want to risk office operations due to these limitations.

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

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.