According to How API Keys Work, the default daily API limit -- which is per site, per day -- is 300.
I started with 300, as expected, but over a period of days, I've noticed that the remaining quota has now been whittled down to about 70 something:
{
"items":
[
{ "user_id":0000,"display_name":"abc","account_id":00000 }
],
"quota_remaining":70,"quota_max":300,"has_more":false
};
Even after the UTC reset today, the quota remaining is still the same. Is this a one time thing where when I use all of this up, that's it, I'm done for good, or is this a bug?
What's more, this doesn't in fact seem to be counting per-site, as I can change the site query parameter to any site on the network, and the count still decreases, as if this is not in fact measured per site, but instead, network-wide:
https://api.stackexchange.com/2.1/users?order=desc&sort=reputation&inname=abc&site=serverfault&filter=!*MxJcsxUhQG*kL8D&callback=test
As an aside, I don't believe I'll need an API key, since the app I'm building makes requests on behalf of each individual user, and since I really don't picture ever hitting the 300 daily cap since I'm caching the data in chrome.storage.local.
This assumes, of course, that the 300 cap is in fact a daily cap and not a lifetime cap. Otherwise, my users would be able to use this for a limited time, until their own lifetime quotas have been exceeded.
Is this a bug, or am I going to need to use even heavier caching, like writing data to a file on the users' filesystems? (euuuuughh - shivers at the thought...)
Two days later, I checked my quota again by hitting the API. It now says 299 out of 300, so it looks like it's been reset. It's currently Nov 8, 7:38 AM UTC, so I'll wait until it rolls over again and do another test.
It's now currently Nov 9, 6:25 AM UTC, and I just hit the API for the first time since my last edit, and I have 297 out of 300 remaining. Is this a bug, or does the quota not reset every 24 hours as documented?
Today is Nov 10, 4:08 AM UTC, and hitting the API today results in a refreshed quota. It does reset, but it doesn't appear to be resetting every 24 hours at 12:00 AM UTC.
2015-01-31T20:02:45.579Z
and2015-01-31T20:06:00.431Z
for me today. It's a bit hard to schedule the API requests when you don't know at what time it is reset...