reference tiktok sandbox rate limit 20260715T172132

TikTok's Display API documents a production rate limit of roughly 600 req/min, but that figure applies only to apps that have passed TikTok's app audit. An app still in sandbox tier (like CreatorTrack's, as of 2026-07-15) gets throttled far more aggressively: confirmed live, the very next single-page resume attempt immediately after a rate-limit hit 429'd again, requiring 60+ second cooldowns to clear rather than a single one-minute wait.

Why: discovered mid-build when CreatorTrack's backfill-social-videos.ts originally told operators to "wait roughly a minute, TikTok's limit is generous" (quoting the production figure) — an operator or unattended retry script trusting that message would retry too soon, get rate-limited again, and could easily conclude the checkpoint/resume logic itself was broken. Fixed in commit b81a30f to give honest sandbox-tier guidance instead.

How to apply: for any future TikTok Display API work, don't hardcode the ~600 req/min production figure into user-facing rate-limit messaging or retry logic until the app has actually passed TikTok's audit and moved to production tier. Budget for longer cooldowns and treat 429s as expected/frequent on a sandbox app.

[auto-memory session 60d132de-4659-485c-8044-427af0ccce7f, confidence 0.68, mode staged]