Steam API 429 Too Many Requests: the fix.

Valve's response-code list defines 429 as the caller being rate limited. It is temporary: the same request succeeds later. It is different from 403, which means the request will never succeed as sent.

You are sending more calls than Steam accepts from your key or IP: over the 100,000-a-day key limit, too many in a short burst, or from an IP Steam has flagged because it keeps producing 403s. Shared hosting and serverless platforms can also share an outbound IP with other heavy callers.

Retry only 429 and 5xx responses, wait 1, 2, 4, 8 seconds and so on with random jitter, cap the wait and the number of tries, and honour Retry-After if a response ever carries one.

import random, time, requests

def get_with_backoff(url, params, tries=6, cap=60):
    for attempt in range(tries):
        r = requests.get(url, params=params, timeout=10)
        if r.status_code not in (429, 500, 502, 503, 504):
            return r
        retry_after = r.headers.get("Retry-After")
        wait = float(retry_after) if retry_after else min(cap, 2 ** attempt) + random.uniform(0, 1)
        time.sleep(wait)
    return r  # still failing: surface it, do not loop forever

async function getWithBackoff(url, tries = 6, cap = 60_000) {
  let res
  for (let attempt = 0; attempt < tries; attempt++) {
    res = await fetch(url)
    if (![429, 500, 502, 503, 504].includes(res.status)) return res
    const ra = Number(res.headers.get("retry-after"))
    const wait = ra > 0 ? ra * 1000 : Math.min(cap, 2 ** attempt * 1000) + Math.random() * 1000
    await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, wait))
  }
  return res
}

Backoff only makes 429s survivable; fewer calls make them rare. Cache responses, batch Steam IDs, poll less often, and fix whatever produces 403s, since that traffic is limited more strictly.

Pro CS2 data never touches Steam, so there is no Steam rate limit to hit. The CS2 API has its own published limits, and unlike Steam it tells you how long to wait: every CS2 API 429 carries Retry-After, X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining and X-RateLimit-Reset, so the backoff code above waits exactly the right time.