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OrcaRouter rate-limits at the workspace level, not per API key. All keys belonging to the same workspace draw from the same bucket. When the limit is exceeded you get an HTTP 429 Too Many Requests response with a Retry-After header.

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Why workspace-scoped

Workspaces are how OrcaRouter groups the keys, members, and billing that belong to a single team or individual. Shared limits inside a workspace make traffic predictable as your team grows: adding a new key (or a new member) doesn’t multiply your shared budget. If you need a higher ceiling, upgrade the workspace’s plan. OrcaRouter does not expose per-model rate limits to callers — the gateway behaves like a single logical provider from your application’s view, consistent with provider opacity. Internal throttling toward upstream providers happens transparently and is not part of the public contract.

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Response

A rate-limited request always returns: 
HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Retry-After: <seconds>
Some rate-limit paths also include a JSON body explaining the limit that was hit; others (the fastest-path workspace bucket) return only the status code and headers. Don’t depend on the body shape — check status code 429 and read Retry-After. When a body is present it follows the OpenAI-compatible envelope with error.type set to orcarouter_api_error. The error.message may be localized (currently Chinese) — see Errors for the envelope structure. Retry-After is in seconds. It’s the rate-limit window duration (conservative — safe to wait exactly that long); the next window will have full budget. Immediately retrying without waiting will fail again.
  1. On 429, read Retry-After.
  2. Wait that many seconds.
  3. Retry the same request.
  4. If a second 429 occurs, increase the wait by 2× (exponential backoff) up to 60 seconds.
  5. If you see 429 repeatedly, consider splitting traffic across multiple models with extra_body.models — see Model Fallbacks.
The OpenAI Python and TypeScript SDKs handle Retry-After automatically by default. You don’t need custom code unless you’ve disabled retries.

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Reactive, not predictive

OrcaRouter does not return X-RateLimit-Remaining / X-RateLimit-Reset headers, so you can’t pre-emptively check how much budget is left. Treat 429 as the signal — back off when you see it, then resume.