Per-user rate limits for the Buildkite API

The Buildkite REST and GraphQL APIs now rate limit on a per-user basis, so one runaway script can't chew through your organization's entire API quota.

There are two limits, applied together:

• Organization-wide limit: Caps total API usage across all human and machine users in your organization.
• Per-user limit: Caps API usage available to an individual user, with a separate limit for machine users.

If someone hits their per-user cap, only their requests are throttled - everyone else carries on as normal. Machine users can have a separate, higher limit to keep automations humming along.

For existing organizations, we've initially set the per-user limit to match the organization-wide limit, so no users will be limited beyond what your organization-wide limit is currently set to.

Per-user API limits are a powerful tool for reducing the risk of individual users consuming too much of your organization-wide limit and negatively impacting your regular CI/CD operations. When you're ready to improve your controls over user API usage, contact support to enable stricter per-user limits.

New organizations will have both limits set to reasonable levels by default.

Your existing API tokens and integrations will keep working without any changes.

For more details, see the REST API rate limits and GraphQL API rate limits documentation.