How does Facebook API Rate Limit work for App Access Token?

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I'm working on a project where an app displays events in the near surrounding based on the personal preferences of the user. We plan on getting the events from the Facebook Graph API using this approach. Due to Facebook's API changes it is much more complicated to search for events in a particular city. Therefore it requires much more API calls than before and i'm worried about FB rate limit.

We want to get the information about events by calling the Graph API with our app access token from our server and then store the data temporarily in our own database. So every time a user searches for events in our app, the client gets the information from our database. Moreover the user can (but don't has to) log-in with his Facebook account in order to provide us more information about him. We want to use the user's access token to call the API in order to get the user's likes.

I've read the FB documentation about the rate limits and some posts here on the site. Apparently FB calculates the number of calls based on the active users (200 calls per user every hour). It says that

"These limits apply to calls made using any access token other than a page access token"

ergo they also apply to the app access token. Additionally in the FB policy it says something about 100M calls per day.

So my questions are:

  1. How does the rate limit work on a per user basis if I am using my App Access Token?
  2. To what token does the "100M" number belong? Is it an overall number for all tokens used by the app?

A similiar question has been posted here some time ago but didn't receive any answers. I hope maybe someone got new information since then. An answer to these questions is crucial to our project, so bear with me if you've read that question before.

Thanks in advance!

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facebookfacebook-graph-api
Since the search endpoint requires the use of a user access token, the whole rest of your whole question is kinda moot. You can not search using your app access token. Search results are tailored to the individual user whose token is used, to prevent exposing search results to people they are not supposed to see. (So even if you switch to user tokens, you'd have to be careful in that regard, if you cache results on your end ...) - CBroe
first of all, thanks for taking the time to respond to my question :) - Niko Pyrkosch
i just tried it with the api explorer and i was able to search for revenues with coordinates and a radius with my app access token with this command. "search?pretty=0&type=place&center=51.450314%2C7.012957&distance=5000&limit=1000". after getting the page id, i was able to query all events of the page. maybe i misunderstood what you meant, but to me it looks likes it is indeed possible to use the app access token to search for events with open privacy settings. feel free to correct me if i'm wrong :) - Niko Pyrkosch
Ok, so you are not actually searching for events via the search endpoint here (then you would get an error with an app access token), but for places only. // “How does the rate limit work on a per user basis if I am using my App Access Token?” - your user basis determines how many calls your app can make - what access token you then use to consume that number of possible API calls, does not matter. - CBroe
It has been a while... But did you find an answer eventually? How does the rate limit work when using only the App Access Token? - nibbana

1 Answers