CUPS (Rate Limit)

What is CUPS?

Compute Units Per Second (CUPS) measures the CU your requests consume each second. Methods have different CU weights, so CUPS is not the same as requests per second.

The CUPS limit applies independently to each API key. Monthly CU is shared across all keys on the account. A new key has its own rate limit but does not create additional monthly CU.

Limits by plan

Custom Enterprise uses the same three Base CUPS choices: 10K, 25K and 100K per key. Every Enterprise configuration includes up to 50 API keys.

For example, on an Enterprise Scale account, each key has a 25K CUPS base limit. Unused capacity on another key does not increase this key's limit. Creating or distributing traffic across multiple keys does not multiply the shared monthly CU allowance.

Temporary capacity for Enterprise

A CUPS Burst Pack adds capacity to one selected key for a fixed period.

Effective CUPS for a key = current Base CUPS + all active Burst increments assigned to that key.

When a Burst expires, only its own increment is removed. A CU Pack adds usage allowance and does not change CUPS.

Handle rate-limit errors

When a key exceeds its effective CUPS limit, reduce the request rate and retry with backoff. If the workload needs more sustained throughput, choose a higher plan or Enterprise Base CUPS tier. For a temporary peak on one Enterprise key, consider a Burst Pack.

An existing rate-limit response may use the following wording. The word "account" in the message does not change the per-key enforcement scope:

{
    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
    "id": 1,
    "error": {
        "code": -32005,
        "message": "Your account has exceeded its Compute Units Per Second capacity. Please check out https://docs.nodereal.io/docs/cups-rate-limit and upgrade to Growth, Team or Business tier for higher rate limit."
    }
}

If the message is ran out of cu, the issue is usable CU allowance, not CUPS. See Compute Units.