At Docebo, we aim to deliver a performant, scalable, and resilient platform that can support growing demand and increasingly complex integrations.
To uphold this standard, we’re introducing a refined API request management strategy and enhanced system overload handling, which align with industry best practices and ensure continued operability and performance for all customers.
🔒 Smarter API Limits: Protecting Fair Access and Service Quality
Starting June 2025, we will begin enforcing the API request limits already defined in your existing contract, ensuring fair usage and protecting platform stability for all customers.
- If your API usage remains within your contractual thresholds, you will not experience any changes.
- If you exceed your limit, the system will respond with a status code "429 - Too Many Requests.
- We recommend adopting a graceful degradation strategy to minimize service disruption, such as exponential backoff with retry logic.
This change reflects proven practices used by leading cloud providers to maintain high system availability while giving clients the transparency and tooling needed to scale responsibly.
⚙️ A More Predictable Response to Load: From 500s to 503s
In parallel, we are improving the system's behavior under high traffic loads. Historically, the platform would return a generic HTTP 500 error when capacity was exceeded.
Moving forward:
- In scenarios where the service is temporarily overwhelmed, you will now see a 503 - Service Unavailable response instead. With more precise information shown directly to the end user as well.
- This adjustment better reflects the real nature of the event and allows for intelligent retry behavior in your applications and integrations.
This marks an important milestone in our journey toward proactive platform resilience. By embracing rate limiting, precise error signaling, and other cloud-native reliability patterns, we can better absorb unexpected load spikes and maintain service continuity, preserving availability for most users even under pressure. This standard practice among leading SaaS platforms reflects our commitment to delivering uninterrupted value, even in moments of exceptional demand.
👀 Proactive Outreach for High Usage Customers
As part of the initial Traffic Monitoring Phase, we closely analyze API usage patterns across our infrastructure. If your organization is identified as consistently exceeding your contracted API request threshold during this observation period, your assigned Customer Success Manager (CSM) will personally reach out to notify you. This proactive communication ensures you have the time and support to align your integrations with the new limits well before enforcement begins.
This approach reflects our commitment to partnership and transparency, ensuring that changes are not just deployed but supported with meaningful guidance and collaboration.
🗓️ Rollout Timeline
We’re deploying these enhancements in phases to allow for visibility, preparation, and adaptation:
- Staging Rollout – Started June 16, 2025
API limits and enhanced status codes will be active in staging. This is your opportunity to test integration behavior and update error-handling logic.
- Progressive Production Activation – From June 25, 2025
We will gradually enforce limits in production, ensuring a controlled and transparent adoption curve.
