Marketing Cloud API Limits - Different Types and Numbers

 

When utilizing APIs the enforced and licensed limits are definitely a factor you need to consider. This is no different when working with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, even though it seems that not everybody is aware of these limits. In this article you’ll learn everything you need to know.

Time-based Limits

All the limits are based on a time period but there are two differences. One kind of limit just makes sure you don’t flood the API with a lot of calls in a short period of time and the other one enforces that you don’t utizlize the API to heavily for the edition you purchased. Find out more below.

Day/Hour/Minute Limit

First off, there are a couple of limits and restrictions for the rate at which you send your requests to the API. There is no absolute limit per day or hour, however for the SOAP-API there is a recommendation to not use more than 2.000 SOAP-Calls per minute.

We recommend a limit of no more than 2k per minute for SOAP calls.

(Source: Intro to Marketing Cloud APIs)

For the REST-API there is nothing specific in the official documentation, however Salesforce Support suggests not using more than 2,500 calls per minute when interacting with that API.

Yearly Limit

Furthermore, there is a yearly limit associated with your Marketing Cloud edition/contract:

  • Basic: 0 calls/year
  • Pro: 2M calls/year
  • Corporate: 6M calls/year
  • Enterprise: 200M calls/year

(Source: How to Select the Right Marketing Cloud Edition)

To find out the exact limit for your account, you need to review your contract or get in touch with your Salesforce Account Executive as it might be possible to add additional API call packages to the license.

Further Information

Retrieve API Call Usage

Unfortunately there currently is no way of seeing the used up API calls anywhere in the Marketing Cloud Interface or via an API-Call itself.

Further Limitations

Additionally, requests are rate limited if your account’s API usage is identified as having an impact on overall system performance (so also no hard limit there):

Marketing Cloud reserves the right to throttle SOAP API calls from a specific customer when those API calls cause slowed system performance. The throttling rate depends on the rate necessary to stabilize operations. If this throttling occurs, the business unit or user causing this issue receives HTTP 500 error messages communicating the limited rate until the calls causing the issue cease. Your Marketing Cloud account representative can help resolve the situation as necessary.

(Source: SOAP API Rate Limiting)

The REST-API at least has an error-type for too many requests:

Too many requests - Retry the API call after number of seconds specified in “Retry-After” header field. - HTTP 429
Too many requests - Your API requests are temporarily blocked due to too many concurrent requests. Contact Salesforce Marketing Cloud technical support to resolve the failure. - HTTP 429

(Source: Handle Errors in REST API)

Written on February 18, 2021