Rate Limiting — Stopping People From Abusing Your App
Why rate limiting matters, implementation approaches, and practical tools for throttling requests
What happens if someone writes a script that calls your API endpoint 10,000 times per second? Without rate limiting, the answer is: whatever the attacker wants.
They could overwhelm your server, run up your cloud costs, brute-force passwords, scrape your entire database, or exhaust your API quotas with third-party services. Rate limiting is the bouncer at the door — it controls how many requests any single user or IP address can make in a given time period.
Why Rate Limiting Matters
Preventing Brute Force Attacks
Without rate limiting, an attacker can try thousands of password combinations per minute on your login endpoint. With rate limiting (say, 5 attempts per minute), the same attack would take years instead of hours.
Protecting Against Cost Attacks
If your app calls
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