How rate limits and fair usage work
The Sally API has two different limits, and they need two different reactions: rate limits protect the service from too many requests, the fair-usage policy governs how much you can transcribe.
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1. Rate limits
Requests are limited per token, and unauthenticated requests per client IP. Each company account has its own limits on top. You can read them from the company account itself: maxApiRequestsPerMinute and maxApiRequestsPerDay.
Reference: GET/v1.0/directories/{directoryId}
When a limit is exceeded, the API answers 429.
2. Fair usage for transcription
Uploads for transcription are additionally governed by a fair-usage policy. It applies the same way to the two-step upload and to the import from a URL. The API reports it with its own codes in the error body:
FUP_LIMIT_EXCEEDED: the transcription quota is used up. Requesting an upload is already rejected, before you send any file.TOO_MANY_CONCURRENT_TRANSCRIPTIONS: too many transcriptions of your company account are running at the same time.
3. How to react
Handle the cases separately. A plain 429 means slow down and retry later. TOO_MANY_CONCURRENT_TRANSCRIPTIONS means wait until running transcriptions have finished. FUP_LIMIT_EXCEEDED means the quota is used up, and retrying soon will only produce the same answer. The error body is described in Errors.