Reading and Respecting the Limit

Most APIs tell you your budget on every response. X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining, X-RateLimit-Reset. When you exceed it you get a 429, usually with a Retry-After header saying how long to wait.

Read Retry-After and honor it. It is the server telling you exactly what it wants, which is a rarer kindness than it sounds.

Slow down before you hit zero. Watching Remaining fall and easing off is better than sprinting into a refusal and being throttled harder.

Where no limit is documented, one request per second is a reasonable default for a public archive. It is slower than you want and much faster than being blocked.