GitHub API Rate Limits in 2026: When Web Scraping Is the Better Choice

GitHub API Rate Limits: The Numbers That Block Your Project GitHub’s REST API is one of the most generous public APIs out there — until it isn’t. At 5,000 requests per hour (authenticated) or a mere 60 requests per hour (unauthenticated), developers routinely hit walls when building anything beyond basic integrations. If you’re doing repository analysis, tracking open-source trends, monitoring competitor activity, or aggregating data across thousands of repos — you’ll burn through that quota in