Hi everyone, - please find below an alternative workaround to Figma 429 rate limits as well reducing weight on Figma infrastructure which helps the ecosystem ;). This as an immediate fix.
The issue isn’t Figma’s limits themselves (which are more recently conservative and problematic), it’s the way large /v1/files/:key?ids=… calls pull entire subtrees (often megabytes), then trigger dozens of image requests when frames have 50-200 children. That burst pattern quickly hits Figma’s limits protection causing 4-5 day lockouts.
A proposed solution is to stop fetching everything upfront and adopt a metadata‑first, prune‑first, fetch‑last pipeline:
- Fetch only component metadata.
- Pre‑filter locally to remove hidden frames, junk nodes and remote libraries.
- Fetch a pruned node tree with limited depth (
depth=2–3) to keep responses <500 KB. - Do code analysis and token extraction locally without extra API calls.
- Fetch images only for the final deduplicated list, in small adaptive batches with exponential backoff.
This reduces jobs from 10+ calls and multi‑MB traffic down to 2–3 calls and <500 KB, eliminating 429 errors even on complex frames.
This is a significant architecture refactor but worked for us at canvaseight.io and at CodeFlow Lab - so worth checking if you currently already follow this pattern or if making these changes solves your rate limits problem. Ultimately it should benefit lowering the impact on Figma API infrastructure and your code generation.
Best regards,
Marcello