Limits and credits
The hourly request limit, and what every REST endpoint and MCP tool costs in credits.
Two separate meters run on every authenticated call, and they are easy to confuse: the hourly limit, which can refuse you, and credits, which only record what a call cost.
The hourly limit
20,000 requests per rolling hour, per credential, shared by /v1 and /mcp. Archive downloads do not spend it. It counts requests, never credits. How the window slides, how keys and OAuth tokens are pooled, and what a 429 carries are on Rate limits and Errors.
Credits
A credit is an accounting figure written to the usage row of each call. Nothing compares it against a balance, so it never blocks a call; it shows in your usage view. A call that fails (a 400, 429 or 503) logs 0 credits, though it still spends one unit of the hourly limit.
REST
Every /v1 endpoint logs 1 credit per successful call, except GET /v1/hyperliquid/ohlcv/export (2 credits, written before the stream starts). The endpoint list below is every operation in the published spec.
On-chain
Hyperliquid
Polymarket
MCP
Each MCP tool has its own price, set in the tool registry: 0 credits for 3 tools; 1 credit for 7 tools; 2 credits for 16 tools; 3 credits for 4 tools; 4 credits for wallet_trace.
Rate limits
One hourly counter per API key, shared by MCP and the REST API — plus the one surface that is authenticated on every request and charged on none.
Errors
The HTTP status codes every Vike data surface returns, the JSON error envelope, and the one endpoint where an auth failure is not an HTTP error at all.