Limiting requests

Our departures/arrivals APIs are commonly used for digital signage, both in public spaces (digital signage in stores, malls, appartment blocks, …) and private spaces (magic mirror, hobby projects, …). Since every API call incurrs costs for the provider (Trafiklab, SL, …), we encourage people to use them in an efficient way.

Generally, our policy is to limit private projects (which affect 5 or less persons) to the bronze, 10,000 requests per month level. We believe this is enough for the usual hobby projects such as a smart mirror, a computer widget, … . Of course, if you have a private project that requires more requests, feel free to reach out to us, but please read the hints below first.

Adjusting the update frequency during the day

In many cases, you’ll have some sort of display showing when the next bus leaves. However, if you never travel between midnight and 06:00, you don’t need to fetch this data. If you’re very unlikely to travel between 22:00 and 23:00, a time when busses are unlikely to be delayed as well, it might be enough to fetch their data once every 5 minutes. During rush hour, when you usually leave for school or work, you want to most accurate data and could update every minute or two. By varying the update frequency throughout the day, you can have high update frequencies when needed while saving requests when you don’t need them. The table below shows an example on how you can vary the number of requests per hour to fit inside the bronze level.

This solution will use about 7600 requests per month, which is well under the maximum of 10.000 monthly requests / 31 days per month = 322 requests per day, and will thus work perfectly. There is even a margin of 70 requests per day, which can be used to update the data even more during certain intervals.