Rate Limits - Tapedrive

Tapenet’s hosted public gateway is free and anonymous, and deliberately conservative: sized for browsing, development, and light traffic. This page covers how the metering works, what your client should do when it hits a limit, and where to go when the free tier stops being enough. Gateways you run with Tapedrive set their own limits. The situation is the same as Solana itself. Public RPC exists, and serious applications pay a provider or run a node. Tapenet’s free gateway is an on-ramp; real workloads bring a paid gateway tier or their own gateway.

How metering works

The gateway meters the two content endpoints with per-IP token buckets on both requests and bytes. When a bucket empties, requests get 429 with a Retry-After header instead of queueing.

Endpoint class	Buckets drawn
Content: `/object/{track_id}`, `/track/{track_id}`	requests + bytes
Catalog (`/v1` family) and status	unmetered

Handling 429s in your client

Respect Retry-After, back off, and treat sustained 429s as a signal to move tiers rather than something to code around. The SDKs already behave this way: rate limiting surfaces as a typed error carrying the retry delay (reading with the SDK).

async function getWithBackoff(url: string): Promise<Response> {
  for (;;) {
    const res = await fetch(url);
    if (res.status !== 429) return res;
    const wait = Number(res.headers.get("retry-after") ?? "1");
    await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, wait * 1000));
  }
}

When the free tier isn’t enough

Three ways up, in increasing order of control: A paid gateway tier. Gateway operators offer higher limits as a service. What’s on offer and what it costs is up to each operator (how gateways work). Run your own gateway. Full control of limits, cache size, and placement. It requires staking past the network’s access threshold (gateway setup). If you’re used to requesting an API key for more throughput: there are no API keys here. Capacity comes from running or paying for infrastructure. A CDN in front. For public content at web scale, edge caching multiplies what any gateway serves (serving through a CDN).

​How metering works

​Handling 429s in your client

​When the free tier isn’t enough

How metering works

Handling 429s in your client

When the free tier isn’t enough