API Rate Limits and Errors: Status Codes and Retries - Hive Inspect

The Hive Inspect API is a work in progress. It is available to a small group of accounts today, and the release for everyone is coming very soon. To ask for early access, message us from the chat bubble in your dashboard.

Rate limit

You can make 120 requests per minute. The limit is counted per key owner, so all the keys one person created share it. When you go over the limit, the API returns 429. Wait a few seconds and try again. If your integration runs in a loop, add a growing delay between retries so it does not keep hitting the limit.

Request up to 200 records per page with limit=200, and use updated_since to fetch only what changed. Both keep your request count low.

Status codes

Code	Meaning	What to do
`200`	Success
`201`	Created	The response holds the new record.
`400`	A parameter is invalid	Read `detail`, fix the request and send it again.
`401`	The API key is missing, wrong, deleted or no longer active	Check the key, or create a new one.
`403`	API access is not enabled for your organization	Message us from the chat bubble in your dashboard.
`404`	The record does not exist in your organization	Check the id.
`409`	A contact with this email already exists	Update the existing contact instead.
`422`	The request body is invalid, or has a field the API does not know	Read `detail` and fix the body.
`429`	Too many requests	Wait, then retry.
`500` and above	Something went wrong on our side	Retry after a short wait. If it keeps happening, contact support.

What an error looks like

Errors return JSON with a detail field that says what went wrong:

{
  "detail": "limit must be between 1 and 200"
}

For 409 on a duplicate contact, detail includes the id of the contact that already has the email, so you can update it:

{
  "detail": {
    "message": "A contact with this email already exists in your organization",
    "existing_contact_id": "0b6f2c1e-7d1a-4c55-9a5e-2f3b8c1d4e6f"
  }
}

Which errors to retry

Retry: 429 and any 5xx response, after a short wait.
Do not retry as is: 400, 401, 403, 404, 409 and 422. These return the same error until you change the request.

Last modified on October 2, 2026