Usage Limits

This page explains the limits you are subject to when using the API, including use of the tools on the developer portal (such as the Export Console, Analytics Console and Search Console).

API Packaging

Your API limits are set by your Meltwater contract. Most core Meltwater packages now include an inclusive API allowance. To increase limits beyond the inclusive allowances, you will need a Meltwater Insights API package.

The following core Meltwater packages include the inclusive API allowance; MI Advanced, Social Essentials, Social Advanced, Essentials Suite and Advanced Suite.

Note that API pricing and limits have changed over time - it is best to check your contract, with your account manager, or with support if you are unsure of your limits.

Listening (Earned Media)

Historic access

Customers with inclusive API access have access to 12 months of historical data.

Customers with an API package:

  • Either your contract will specify your historical access limit (for example 12 months)
  • Or, if no limit is specified in your contract you can access the entire historic archive of news and social data.

As an example if you are limited to 12 months of historical archive access you can export data and run analytics on data from up to 12 months back from the current date.

Documents per month

Customers with inclusive API access can export up to 30,000 documents per month.

Customers with an API package have their limit stated in their contract, for example 100,000 documents per month.

This limit is shared across listening features, including exports, searches and data streams, as well as Explore+ searches.

This limit is reset on the 1st day of each month.

When you get close to your monthly limit (90% of your quota) and when you reach your limit the system will send administrators on your account an ‘API Usage’ system alert. See the System Alerts help guide for more information on how to configure alert delivery.

Note that if you export the same document twice, this will be counted as two documents. Documents are not de-duplicated.

You can see the number of documents you have taken from the platform by calling the GET usage/me/metrics endpoint. See our guide on accessing usage statistics for more details.

Documents can be imported into the Meltwater Platform via Bring Your Own Content (BYOC). Retrieval of these imported documents through exports, searches or data streams are not counted towards your document usage limits.

Exports

Exports per month

Customers with inclusive API access can run up to 50 exports per month.

Customers with an API package have their limit stated in their contract, for example 100 exports per month.

This limit is reset on the 1st day of each month.

When you get close to your monthly limit (90% of your quota) and when you reach your limit the system will send administrators on your account an ‘API Usage’ system alert. See the System Alerts help guide for more information on how to configure alert delivery.

You can see the number of exports you have run by calling the GET usage/me/metrics endpoint. See our guide on accessing usage statistics for more details.

Understanding exports
It is important to understand that when you create an export through the Export Console or using the API this can contain up to 5 saved searches or tags. An export counts as one export against your monthly allowance, regardless of how many searches or tags it contains (up to the maximum of 5).

Documents per export

A single export can contain a maximum of 2,000,000 documents. When an export is created, we check the number of results the export will generate. If the export is forecast to return more than 2,000,000 documents the export will be automatically sampled down to approximately 2,000,000 documents. Sampling is random across the export time window.

Maximum export window

Unless stated otherwise in your contract, the maximum time window for an analytics request is 12 months. For example from 1st January 2025 to 1st January 2026.

Endpoint limits

The following export endpoints are limited to 20 calls / minute:

  • POST /export/v1/exports/one-time
  • POST /export/v1/exports/recurring
  • POST /v3/exports/one-time
  • POST /v3/exports/recurring

Analytics & search

The recently added earned media search feature is limited in the same way as earned media analytics features. Calls to the search feature are counted towards your daily analytics call limit, and the same time period limits are applied.

Daily calls

Customers with inclusive API access can run up to 50 calls per day.

Customers with an API package have their limit stated in their contract, for example 100 calls per day.

You can see the number of analytics calls you have requested by calling the GET usage/me/requests endpoint. See our guide on accessing usage statistics for more details.

Additionally you can inspect headers returned by the API. These headers are returned for every analytics request:

Header Name Description
RateLimit-Day-Limit This is the number API credits you have per day as set by your API package. (For example 120 credits per day.)
RateLimit-Day-Remaining The remaining number of API calls before you are rate limited. If this falls to 0, you are rate limited. If you hit your API limit, all subsequent requests will fail with a suitable error message and HTTP response code of 403 or 429.
RateLimit-Day-Reset Unix timestamp when the next reset will occur.

The day rate limit for a period begins when the first API request is sent after it has been reset to 0.

For example, a day rate limit period would start if the first API request is sent at 9:30am and finish 24 hours later when it is reset to 0 again. This is in contrast to the time periods for the usage statistics where the request counts for Last 7/30 days would consistently start at 12:00am UTC.

Maximum time window

Unless stated otherwise in your contract, the maximum time window for an analytics request is 12 months. For example from 1st January 2025 to 1st January 2026.

API call limits

In addition to the daily analytics call limit of your package, all calls to earned media analytics endpoints are limited to 5 calls / second and 100 calls / minute.

Data Streams

Concurrent data streams

If you have access to the data streaming feature, your contract will state how many “Data Streams” you can run concurrently streaming data from the platform.

For example, if your contract says you can use 25 Data Streams, you can have up to 25 streams running from the API simultaneously.

You can see how many streams you have running by calling the GET /v3/hooks endpoint.

API call limits

The following export endpoints are limited to 20 calls / minute:

  • POST /v3/hooks

Explore+

The following endpoints are limited to 10 calls / minute:

  • POST /v3/explore_plus/analytics/custom
  • POST /v3/explore_plus/search

All other endpoints are subject to the general rate limits described below.

Mira API

If you have access to the Mira API, please note these limits.

Prompt executions per month

Your package will specify the number of prompts you can execute per calendar month, for example 5,000.

Rate limits

The Mira API is limited to 60 requests per minute. This limit is shared across both the Responses endpoint and the MCP server.

Conversation size

Conversations with Mira can contain up to 290,000 tokens of message history. This includes all messages in the thread—both your prompts and Mira’s responses. If a conversation exceeds this limit, the most recent messages are retained. See the Mira API Responses documentation for more details.

General API call limits

Calls to endpoints, unless discussed above, are limited to 100 calls / minute.

Additionally, there is a global platform-wide rate limit of 2000 requests per hour per IP address. This limit exists solely for platform protection and is set high enough that normal API usage should never trigger it, regardless of your company_id.

You can see the number of API calls you have requested by calling the GET usage/me/requests endpoint. See our guide on accessing usage statistics for more details.