Originally published on the Kolachi Tech blog. Canonical link points back to the original.

If you treat Shopify's GraphQL Admin API like a REST endpoint and fire concurrent paginated requests, you will hit a wall of 429s fast. The reason is simple: Shopify doesn't rate-limit by request count. It limits by calculated query cost.

Once that clicks, the limits stop being a wall and become a budget. Here's the working model.

The core idea: cost, not count

REST charges the same for every call, whether you read one field or a thousand. Shopify scrapped that for GraphQL. The server runs static analysis on your query before execution, scores it by complexity, and deducts points from a bucket.