Introducing Scaled Rate Limits for Bitbucket Cloud API

We’re excited to announce a significant improvement to our API rate limits for Bitbucket Cloud. This new feature will provide more flexibility and capacity for our Standard and Premium customers, especially those with larger teams.

What’s Changing?

  1. Scaled Rate Limits: We’re introducing scaled rate limits to a group of endpoints that can handle the increased load from the API requests. This group of API endpoints is in a collective known as the api resource group, which covers most /2.0/repositories/* endpoints. This scaling applies to requests made via Access Tokens and Forge asApp API requests.
  2. New Rate Limit Headers: To help you manage your API usage, we’re adding new response headers for affected endpoints when accessed via Access Tokens or Forge.

How Do Scaled Rate Limits Work?

The new scaled rate limits are based on your workspace’s paid user count. Here’s what you need to know:

  • The base rate limit remains 1000 requests per hour (RPH) for workspaces with up to 100 seats.
  • For workspaces with more than 100 seats, you’ll get an additional 10 RPH for each seat above 100.
  • The maximum rate limit is capped at 10,000 RPH.

For example, if your workspace has 250 seats, your new rate limit would be:

1000 RPH (base) + (150 additional seats * 10 RPH) = 2500 RPH

Who Benefits?

This change benefits our Standard and Premium plan customers with more than 100 users. Free plans, which are limited to 5 users, and paid plans with under 100 paid users will not see any changes to their rate limits.

New Rate Limit Headers

To help you monitor your API usage, we’ve introduced new response headers for the affected endpoints. These headers will provide real-time information about your current rate limit status, which helps you to optimize your API requests and avoid hitting any limits.

Requests made by Access Tokens or Forge to scaled endpoints will receive 3 new headers:

New Bitbucket API Rate Limit Headers
  • X-RateLimit-Limit: Represents the total number of requests permitted per hour. Note, this is not the number of remaining possible requests.
  • X-RateLimit-Resource: Identifies the API endpoint resource group receiving increased rate limits
  • X-RateLimit-NearLimit: A boolean value indicating whether less than 20% of the requests remain

What’s Next?

This change is already live for all Standard and Premium customers. You don’t need to take any action to benefit from these new limits – they’ll be applied automatically based on your workspace’s paid user count.

We’re excited to see how this change will empower our customers to build even more powerful integrations and workflows with Bitbucket Cloud. As always, we welcome your feedback and questions. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team if you have any concerns and reach out to Atlassian Community to get help from our champions.