Architecture9 min read

Rate Limiting: The Feature Nobody Thinks About Until It's Too Late

Your API works perfectly at 10 requests per second. At 10,000, it falls over. Here's how I implement rate limiting that protects without annoying legitimate users.

By Jason TeixeiraDecember 15, 2025
SecurityAPIRate LimitingArchitectureAWS
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Nobody puts "implement rate limiting" on the sprint board. It's not a user story. It doesn't move a metric. Product never asks for it.

Then one day, someone scripts 50,000 requests to your API in 30 seconds and your database melts. Or worse — a single user's runaway script costs you $800 in AWS Lambda invocations overnight.

Both of these happened to me. Now rate limiting is in my starter template.

The Three Layers

I implement rate limiting at three layers, because each catches different abuse patterns:

Layer 1: Edge (CloudFront / Vercel)

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Jason Teixeira
Written by
Jason Teixeira
Founder, Sage Ideas Studio · Principal Engineer
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// solo studio// no analytics resold// every commit human-reviewed