The Free plan now has an API rate limit (and why that's good news)

The Free plan exists so you can build something real before paying for it — not so that it becomes the cheapest botnet on the internet. Today it gets the one guard rail it was missing: a rate limit on API traffic.

What’s limited

Every Free-plan PocketBase instance can serve 500 API requests per hour. That’s requests to its /api paths — collection reads and writes, auth calls, realtime connections, file downloads. That’s a lot for a hobby project: a small app with a few dozen active users will comfortably sit under it.

What’s not limited: your admin panel, any static frontends you’ve deployed, and everything outside /api. And your data is never touched — the limit throttles requests, it doesn’t pause or delete anything.

What happens when you cross it

If an instance serves more than 500 API requests in an hour, its API paths answer 429 until the top of the next hour, when the counter resets automatically. The instance itself keeps running the whole time, and you can still log into the admin panel to browse your data or export it.

You’ll also get an email the first time it happens each day, and the instance page in the dashboard shows a live progress bar of the current hour’s usage — so you’ll see the limit coming before your users do.

How to lift it

Two options:

• Wait. The counter resets at the top of every hour, so a launch-day spike heals itself.
• Upgrade. Starter ($5/month) and Pro ($20/month) have no API request limit. Upgrading unblocks a throttled instance immediately — no deploy, no restart.

If you’re consistently nudging 500 requests an hour, that’s the platform telling you it’s time for a paid plan — and honestly, at that point your project has earned it.