Tradovate API limit policy

To ensure consistent, reliable service for all users, we've implemented a protective API limiter on our infrastructure to reduce the likelihood of Tradovate rate-limiting or blocking our servers.

Why we're doing this

As many of you know, Tradovate enforces API rate limiting to protect their servers from overload. While they don't disclose their exact algorithm, we've now gathered enough usage data to confirm that their rate limiting is not scoped only to individual user connections - it's also applied at the entire IP connection level.

Our FutuCopy Trade Copier plan ($39/month) operates on a shared-tenant model. We run a cluster of servers that dynamically distributes connections across them. This means a single user running 100 accounts with heavy trading activity can trigger Tradovate to rate-limit that server. As a result, another user routed through the same server - even with just one account - could experience rate limiting through no fault of their own.

Our solution: fair-use limits

To ensure equitable access for everyone, we're introducing the following limits:

750 API calls per 30-minute rolling window, which closely aligns with Tradovate's published limits.
Once a user reaches 30% of this limit, a rate limit progress bar will appear so you can monitor your usage in real time.
If a user exceeds 750 API calls within a 30-minute window, the copier will liquidate all open positions and disable copy trading until usage drops back to 500.

What the data shows

Based on several weeks of usage monitoring:

90% of users will never exceed 30% of the limit and will never see the progress bar.
99% of users will never reach the 100% limit.

Tips if you're in the affected 1%

Enable "Use Market Orders For Followers." Placing limit/stop orders and then modifying them across all follower accounts consumes API calls quickly. This is especially true for trailing stop orders, which propagate to every follower.
Use Rithmic accounts as followers if your prop firm offers them.
Consider our Pro Server plan. Your copier runs in an isolated cloud instance with its own static IP address, and the FutuCopy limiter is not enabled. While this won't prevent Tradovate from limiting you if you exceed their limits, you'll be able to fully utilize their available capacity - and our copier handles Tradovate's limits gracefully using p-ticket retries.

Looking ahead

If Tradovate relaxes their limits or scopes their rate limiting to per-user accounts rather than per-IP address, we'll update our system accordingly.

Thank you for your understanding and continued support.