Rate Limits & Quotas

Why quotas?¶

EarthScope runs its data services on a fixed budget, and every byte delivered from the cloud costs money. Quotas keep a few heavy users from exhausting resources meant for the whole community.

At a glance¶

What counts vs. what gets blocked¶

Everything counts toward your quota, but only data products are blocked.

Over quota, you can still fetch station metadata, but dataselect returns 429 until your window resets. Large metadata pulls still add to your usage.

How a request is evaluated¶

As of December 15, 2026:

What you’ll see when blocked¶

Requests over a limit get HTTP 429 Too Many Requests with a plain-text body identifying who was limited.

HTTP/1.1 429 Forbidden
Content-Type: text/plain

Your request was temporarily blocked for exceeding your quota.

IP: 203.0.113.42
Request ID: 4TyzHTaYWb1GX1qTfsHhEqV6HUDd_BzoBZnwfnvQc_1oF26ClkoUSEQ==

If you believe this is an error, contact help@earthscope.org with the Request ID above.

HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Cache-Control: no-store

Your request was temporarily blocked for exceeding your quota.

User: auth0|abc123
Request ID: 4TyzHTaYWb1GX1qTfsHhEqV6HUDd_BzoBZnwfnvQc_1oF26ClkoUSEQ==

If you believe this is an error, contact help@earthscope.org with the Request ID above.

Getting more headroom¶

Use an EarthScope user account¶

An account is required for data products from December 15, 2026 and gives you 20× the anonymous quota, tracked by account rather than IP.

Request only what you need¶

Narrow time windows and channel selections reduce transfer size.

Need more than the quotas allow? Use direct access¶

For bulk downloads or large-scale processing, read miniSEED directly from Amazon S3. Direct access does not count toward your quota.

To request Repository access, email help@earthscope.org.

Questions or errors¶

Blocked in error, or need more than these limits allow? Email help@earthscope.org with the User ID or IP from the response.