Rate Limiting: Protecting Your API Without Punishing Your Users
· 6 min read
Rate limiting is one of those features that every production API needs, nobody enjoys implementing, and most teams get subtly wrong the first time.
The common mistake is not forgetting rate limiting entirely. It is applying a single global limit and calling it done. Fifty requests per minute, no exceptions, no differentiation. Your power users hit the wall during normal operations. Scrapers figure out the exact limit and stay just below it. Login endpoints get the same allowance as read-only data endpoints. Everyone is equally unhappy.
Fiber v3's Limiter middleware ships with the primitives to do better: dynamic limits per route, sliding window algorithms, per-user keys, and pluggable storage backends. The trick is knowing when to use which.