Limits and fair use
Every key is capped at 60 requests per minute. Beyond that there is no daily quota and no charge — just a request to be considerate, because this runs on someone else’s bill.
The rate limit
Exceeding 60 requests per minute on a single key returns 429 with a Retry-After header telling you how many seconds remain in the window. Wait that long and carry on.
Retry-After: 42
{
"error": "Too Many Requests",
"limit": "60 requests per minute",
"retryAfter": 42
}The counter is held in memory on each server instance rather than in a shared store, so it is approximate: under load you may get slightly more through than the stated number. It is there to stop runaway scripts, not to meter you precisely. Do not build anything that depends on the exact figure.
What is asked of you
- Cache. The archive changes once a year, in March. Treat it as static.
- Do not poll. Nothing here updates in real time. A nightly refresh is already more often than the data changes.
- Take the narrow endpoint. Fetching the whole archive to read one year moves several megabytes to answer a question that a single ceremony request would have answered.
- Back off on 500s. Retrying hard against a struggling backend is how a small problem becomes an outage.
Building something that needs sustained or high-volume access? Say so before you start rather than after — it is a solvable problem, and much easier to solve in advance.
Response sizes
| Request | Scope | Size |
|---|---|---|
/oscars | All 97 ceremonies | Megabytes |
/oscars/year= | One ceremony, ~24 categories | Tens of kilobytes |
/person/, /movie/, /award/ | Matching nominations only | Kilobytes |
Caching
Responses are served through a CDN, so a repeated identical request is usually cheap. The most effective thing you can do is still to keep your own copy.
# Pull once at deploy time, serve from your own store afterwards.
curl "https://api.uractor.com/oscars/apikey=YOUR_API_KEY" -o oscars.jsonGuarantees
None, honestly. No SLA, no uptime target, no deprecation policy, no support contract. The shape of the responses has been stable for years and there is no plan to change it, but this is a free service run by one person. If your product cannot tolerate it disappearing, hold your own copy of the data.
Commercial use
Personal projects, research, teaching, hobby apps: go ahead. If it is a commercial product, please get in touch first.