A complete guide to Intercom API rate limits

Let’s set the scene. You’re building a slick custom integration for your support team on Intercom. Things are finally starting to work. Your automation is humming along, tickets are being updated, and you’re feeling pretty proud of yourself. Then, out of nowhere, everything just stops. You dive into the logs and there it is: the dreaded "429 Too Many Requests" error.

If that sounds a little too familiar, you’re definitely not alone. API rate limits are a fact of life for anyone trying to build and scale their tools on platforms like Intercom. They exist to keep the platform stable for everyone, but they can feel like a major roadblock when you’re just trying to build better workflows for your team.

This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about Intercom API rate limits. We’ll cover why they matter for your business and show you how to work with them, whether you're coding from the ground up or looking for a smarter, pre-built solution.

What are the Intercom API rate limits?

At its heart, API rate limiting is just a cap on how many requests your app can send to a server in a certain amount of time. It’s a way for platforms to make sure that no single application can hog all the resources and slow things down for everybody else. Intercom uses rate limiting to keep its service speedy and reliable.

According to Intercom's official documentation, the default limits on its REST API change depending on the kind of app you're using.

• Private Apps: These are capped at 10,000 API calls per minute for each app, with a total limit of 25,000 API calls per minute for the entire workspace. So, if you have a few private apps running, they all have to share that 25,000-call workspace pool.

• Public Apps: These also get a limit of 10,000 API calls per minute per app. The key difference is that each public app gets its own separate quota, so they don’t have to share with each other.

But here’s the detail that often trips people up: Intercom doesn’t just count requests over a 60-second period. To stop sudden bursts of traffic, it actually spreads the limit across 10-second windows. That means a limit of 10,000 calls per minute actually works out to around 1,666 calls every 10 seconds. If you try to blast all 10,000 requests in the first five seconds of a minute, you’ll get throttled way before that minute is over.

Here’s a quick summary:

App Type	Per-App Limit (per minute)	Per-Workspace Limit (per minute)	Distributed Limit (per 10 seconds)
Private App	10,000	25,000 (shared)	~1,666
Public App	10,000	25,000 (separate)	~1,666

To help you stay on the right side of these limits, Intercom includes a few handy HTTP headers in its API responses. These let your developers keep an eye on usage as it happens:

• "X-RateLimit-Limit": The total number of requests you’re allowed.

• "X-RateLimit-Remaining": How many requests you have left in the current window.

• "X-RateLimit-Reset": A timestamp that tells you when your request counter will reset back to the limit.

Why Intercom API rate limits matter for your support operations

Going over your rate limit is more than just a technical problem for your developers. It has a real impact on your support team and, more importantly, your customers. When your automations fail, the effects can be felt across your entire support system.

Here’s a look at how hitting those limits can cause trouble for your business.

Your customers are left hanging

Let's say your custom AI bot is built to give instant answers to common questions. If it hits a rate limit, it can’t create or update tickets in Intercom. Suddenly, that "instant" response is anything but, and customers are left waiting. This can hurt your customer satisfaction scores and mess with your team’s response time metrics.

Your automations and data syncs break

A lot of teams use the API for important behind-the-scenes work, like updating user profiles in bulk or syncing conversation data with a CRM. If these jobs fail halfway through because of rate limiting, you end up with messy, incomplete data and a manual cleanup task that no one wants to do.

Your developers get pulled into firefighting

Instead of building cool new features for your product, your engineering team is stuck troubleshooting API errors. They have to spend their time building and testing workarounds like retry logic and backoff systems, which takes their focus away from more valuable projects.

Your reports become unreliable

If your reporting tools pull data straight from the Intercom API, hitting rate limits means you're not getting the complete story. Incomplete data can skew your metrics on everything from agent productivity to ticket trends, leading to bad business decisions based on faulty information.

What starts as a simple "429 Too Many Requests" error can easily become a bigger problem involving frustrated customers, unreliable data, and a distracted engineering team.

How to handle Intercom API rate limits: The manual approach

So, what do you do when you start hitting these limits? If your team is building its own custom integrations, developers usually have a few tricks up their sleeves. These methods work, but they all require a fair bit of coding and ongoing maintenance.

Here are the three main ways to handle rate limits manually:

• Check the headers first: This is the most straightforward way to prevent errors. Before making a new API call, your code can check the "X-RateLimit-Remaining" header. If the number is getting low, the script can just pause and wait for the reset timestamp in "X-RateLimit-Reset" to pass. It’s a simple "stop and wait" tactic that can work, but it’s not very elegant.

• Use a backoff strategy: This is a smarter way to handle things when you do get a 429 error. Instead of trying again right away, the code waits for a short, random amount of time. If that second attempt also fails, it waits for a longer period, and so on. This is often called "exponential backoff," and it stops your system from hammering the API and making the problem worse.

• Lean on libraries: To save some time, developers often use pre-built libraries that have all this logic baked in. A Node.js developer might use a package like "retry", while someone working in Ruby might use the "retries" gem. These tools can simplify the code, but they also add another dependency to your project that needs to be managed and kept up to date.

Building this kind of error handling from scratch is no small feat. It involves a lot of planning, testing, and making sure you don't lose any data if a request fails after a few retries. For most support teams, this is a heavy lift that isn't practical without dedicated engineering resources.

Intercom pricing and Intercom API rate limits

Intercom’s pricing is broken down into tiers. While you can generally access the API on most plans, some of the more advanced features and potentially higher limits could be tied to the more expensive packages. It’s worth figuring out what each plan offers before you sign up, especially if you’re planning to lean heavily on automations.

Here’s a quick look at their current plans:

Plan	Pricing	Key Features
Starter	Starts at $74/month	Live chat, shared inbox, basic help center, AI chatbot (Fin), basic reporting. Good for small businesses getting started.
Pro	Custom pricing	Everything in Starter, plus ticket routing, advanced automation rules, multiple team inboxes, and integrations with tools like Slack and Salesforce.
Premium	Custom pricing	Everything in Pro, plus advanced features like custom roles, workload management, and customizable reporting dashboards.

For the Pro and Premium plans, you have to get in touch with their sales team for a quote. This can make it tricky to compare options and budget accordingly without jumping on a sales call.

A smarter way to automate Intercom without hitting Intercom API rate limits

Instead of spending weeks building and maintaining a complex integration just to deal with rate limits, what if you could use a platform that was built to handle it all for you?

This is where a tool like eesel AI can be a huge help. eesel is an AI platform that connects to Intercom with a simple one-click integration, managing all the tricky API stuff so you don’t have to. It's designed to be completely self-serve, so you can get started without writing a line of code or sitting through a required sales demo.

Here’s how eesel helps you sidestep the headache of Intercom API rate limits:

• Get set up in minutes, not months: With eesel, you can forget about building retry logic or monitoring API headers. The platform is already optimized to work with Intercom's API, fetching data and taking actions in a way that automatically respects the limits. This frees up countless hours for your team to focus on designing great support workflows instead of worrying about quotas.

• Test your automations with confidence: One of the trickiest parts of building API integrations is testing them at scale without messing with your live production data. eesel has a clever solution for this with its simulation mode. You can test your AI agent's responses on thousands of your real, historical Intercom tickets without making a single live API call. This lets you see exactly how it will perform before it ever talks to a customer.

eesel AI's simulation mode allows testing automations on historical data to avoid hitting live Intercom API rate limits.

• Unify all your knowledge, instantly: eesel can train your AI agent on your past Intercom conversations, macros, and help center articles. This is a data-heavy process that would normally involve tons of API calls, but eesel takes care of it all in the background. Your team won't have to build and run data-syncing scripts that could get you rate-limited.

Using a specialized platform like eesel AI gives your team the power of a custom integration without the engineering overhead. You get to focus on creating great customer experiences, not on managing API quotas.

Final thoughts on Intercom API rate limits

Intercom API rate limits are something every team needs to think about if they want to automate and scale their support. They’re there for a good reason, but they can definitely be a pain if you're not ready for them.

You really have two ways to go. You can take the DIY route, which means your engineering team builds and maintains all the rate-limiting logic themselves. This gives you complete control, but it costs a lot in terms of time and people.

Or, you can use a platform that’s already solved this problem. For teams that want to roll out powerful AI and automation without the technical headaches, a tool like eesel AI is the most straightforward path forward. It gives you all the perks of a deep Intercom integration without any of the complexity.

Ready to automate your Intercom support without worrying about API limits? Start your free trial of eesel AI and see how easy it can be.