Telegram 429: Too Many Requests

The limits

Telegram's own guidance is roughly one message a second in any single chat, no more than 20 messages a minute in a group, and around 30 messages a second across all chats. It does not publish exact figures and adjusts them, so treat these as the pace to stay under rather than a target.

A bot that answers people as they talk to it rarely comes near them. The bots that hit 429 are the ones that send in bulk: broadcasts, reminders to every subscriber at once, or a loop that edits a message on every tick.

Wait, then pace

The error includes retry_after, in seconds. Sending again sooner only extends it. Both big libraries have a ready-made way to respect it automatically, and a broadcast should additionally be spread out rather than fired all at once.

const { autoRetry } = require('@grammyjs/auto-retry');

// Waits out retry_after and repeats the call, instead of throwing.
bot.api.config.use(autoRetry());

# pip install "python-telegram-bot[rate-limiter]"
from telegram.ext import AIORateLimiter, ApplicationBuilder

application = ApplicationBuilder().token(token).rate_limiter(AIORateLimiter()).build()