What should I use for API rate limiting and quotas?

For API rate limiting and quotas, the best choice depends on where you want enforcement to happen:

Common options

• API Gateway / API Management
  Best if you want centralized enforcement for all clients and services.
  Good examples: Kong, NGINX, Apigee, AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management, Google Cloud API Gateway.

• Application-level middleware Best if you need custom logic tied to users, plans, or business rules.
  Usually implemented in your API service using a token bucket or leaky bucket algorithm.

• Redis-backed distributed rate limiter Best for multiple app instances or microservices, because it keeps limits consistent across servers.
  Common approach: app middleware + Redis.

What to use in practice

• If you want simple and robust: use an API gateway with built-in rate limiting.
• If you need fine-grained per-user/per-plan quotas: use application middleware + Redis.
• If you’re on cloud and want managed: use your provider’s API management offering.

Good rule of thumb

• Rate limiting = short-term protection, e.g. “100 requests/minute”
• Quotas = longer-term usage caps, e.g. “10,000 requests/day”

Recommended implementation pattern

Use:

1. Gateway for coarse global limits
2. App/Redis for user-level quotas and plan enforcement
3. Monitoring/logging for visibility and abuse detection

If you want, I can recommend a specific solution based on your stack, like Node.js, Python, AWS, Kubernetes, or microservices.