How Bluesky's rate limits actually work
Updated 2026-07-25
Every social network limits how fast you can act. Bluesky is unusual in that it publishes the numbers, and they are worth knowing before you start tidying up a few hundred follows — because “clean my following list” is exactly the kind of job that runs into them.
Writes are billed in points, not requests
Bluesky’s rate limiting for anything that creates or changes a record works on a points budget. Each write costs:
| Operation | Points |
|---|---|
| Create a record (post, follow, like, repost) | 3 |
| Update a record | 2 |
| Delete a record (unfollow, unlike) | 1 |
Your account gets 5,000 points per hour and 35,000 points per day. On top of that sits a hard ceiling on how many records you can create: roughly 1,666 per hour and 11,666 per day.
Two things fall out of that immediately.
Unfollowing is cheap; following is expensive. An unfollow deletes the follow record you created, so it costs a single point. Following someone costs three. Cleaning up 500 accounts you follow costs 500 points — a tenth of your hourly budget. Following 500 new accounts costs 1,500, and you’d hit the daily ceiling long before you got through a few thousand.
The budget is shared across everything you do. Points spent liking posts from your phone are points you cannot spend following people from a tool. If you have been active all morning, your remaining budget is smaller than the headline number suggests.
Sessions have their own limit
Creating a session — signing in with an app password — is limited separately: about 30 per five minutes and 300 per day per account. That sounds generous until a badly written tool logs in on every request. Any client worth using keeps one session alive and refreshes it instead.
Reading is limited too, just differently
Read requests to the public app view are limited per IP address rather than per account, in the region of a few thousand requests per five minutes. You will not notice this as a human. It matters for tools: fetching the followers of an account with 50,000 followers means 500 paginated requests, which is why serious tools cache results and cap how deep they go.
What happens when you hit a limit
The API answers with HTTP 429 and a RateLimit-Reset header telling you when
the window opens again. Nothing is broken and nothing is banned — the next
action simply has to wait. The failure mode that hurts is a bulk operation cut
off halfway through: you are left with no idea which half went through.
How to stay clear
- Spread big clean-ups. A few hundred unfollows in one session is fine. Thousands in one hour is not, even though the arithmetic technically allows it.
- Leave headroom. Aim to use roughly half to two thirds of the hourly allowance, so normal activity from your phone still fits.
- Prefer deletes over creates when you have a choice: they are three times cheaper.
- Use a tool that tracks the budget for you rather than one that fires requests until the server says no. Blue Horizons caps itself at 3,000 points per hour and 20,000 per day, checks the budget before every single write, and stops the run cleanly with a report of what is left.
The limit that isn’t a number
There is a second kind of limit, and it is social. Following a thousand accounts and unfollowing them a week later is a recognisable pattern, and other users recognise it faster than any algorithm. Blue Horizons deliberately has no auto-follow and no scheduled churn for that reason: the tool is for cleaning up an audience you actually have, not for manufacturing one.
Want to see where you stand? Analyze any handle for free — no sign-in — and you will see how many of the accounts you follow never followed you back.