Intercom Rate Limits

Overview

Intercom enforces rate limits per app and per workspace. Handle 429 errors gracefully with exponential backoff, queue-based throttling, and proactive header monitoring. This skill gives you five composable defenses — a retry wrapper, a live monitor, a request queue, request batching, and metrics — so a high-volume integration stays under the ceiling instead of spraying 429s.

The full, copy-paste TypeScript for all five lives in references/implementation.md; this page carries the limits, the header contract, and a lean skeleton so you can wire it up from here and drill in for depth.

Rate Limit Tiers

Scope	Limit	Notes
Private app	10,000 req/min	Per app
Public app (OAuth)	10,000 req/min	Per app
Workspace total	25,000 req/min	Across all apps
Search endpoints	1,000 req/min	/contacts/search, /conversations/search
Scroll endpoints	100 req/min	Bulk data export

Rate Limit Headers

Every response includes these headers — read them to throttle proactively:

X-RateLimit-Limit: <max requests per window>
X-RateLimit-Remaining: <remaining requests>
X-RateLimit-Reset: <unix timestamp when window resets>

Prerequisites

• An Intercom access token in INTERCOM_ACCESS_TOKEN (Developer Hub > Your App

  Authentication) — all requests below send it as Authorization: Bearer.

• The official SDK: npm install intercom-client.
• For queue-based throttling: npm install p-queue.
• Read an existing client wrapper before editing so you extend it rather than duplicate it.

Instructions

Apply the defenses in order — each builds on the previous one. Use Write to create a new intercom-rate-limit.ts module, or Edit to fold these into an existing client wrapper.

1. Wrap every call in header-aware retry. On 429, wait until X-RateLimit-Reset; on 5xx, exponential backoff with jitter. Skeleton:

   async function withRateLimitRetry<T>(op: () => Promise<T>): Promise<T> {
     // On 429: delay = (X-RateLimit-Reset * 1000) - Date.now() + 1000
     // On 5xx: delay = baseDelay * 2^attempt + jitter, capped at maxDelayMs
   }
   

2. Add a proactive monitor. Feed response headers into a monitor and call waitIfNeeded() before firing when usage crosses ~90%, so you slow down before a 429.

3. Throttle with a queue. Route requests through a p-queue capped at ~150 req/s to keep bursts under the per-app ceiling.

4. Batch to cut request count. Replace N individual lookups with OR-batched contacts.search queries.

5. Emit metrics. Log remaining, usage_percent, and ms_until_reset so you can alert before saturation.

Full implementation for every step: references/implementation.md.

Output

Wiring these in yields three concrete artifacts in your integration:

• A resilient client wrapper — every call routed through withRateLimitRetry + queuedRequest, so transient 429/5xx are absorbed automatically instead of surfacing as failures.
• Proactive throttling — the monitor pauses outbound traffic before the window is exhausted, converting hard 429s into short, controlled waits.
• Observability — structured intercom.rate_limit metrics (remaining, usage percent, ms-until-reset) ready for dashboards and alerts.

Error Handling

Scenario	Strategy	Implementation
429 with reset header	Wait until reset	Parse X-RateLimit-Reset
429 without headers	Exponential backoff	1s, 2s, 4s, 8s, 16s
Approaching limit (>90%)	Proactive throttle	Check remaining before request
Bulk operations	Queue-based	p-queue with intervalCap
Multiple apps hitting workspace limit	Coordinate	Shared rate limit monitor

Examples

Absorb a burst of contact lookups. Fan out hundreds of contacts.find calls without tripping the limit by routing each through the queue + retry wrapper:

const contacts = await Promise.all(
  userIds.map(id =>
    queuedRequest(() => client.contacts.find({ contactId: id }))
  )
);

Precise wait on a 429. When a response carries X-RateLimit-Reset, wait exactly until that epoch (plus a 1s buffer) instead of guessing a backoff — see Step 1 in references/implementation.md.

Batch email lookups. Replace 100 single-contact requests with 10 OR-batched searches — full findContactsByEmails helper in references/implementation.md.

Resources

• Rate Limiting
• Pagination
• p-queue
• Full implementation — the five defenses in copy-paste TypeScript

Next Steps

Rate limiting is one layer of a hardened Intercom integration. Once retries and throttling are in place, pair them with intercom-common-errors for full status-code triage, and intercom-security-basics for token scoping and webhook-signature verification.