AI agent keeps getting rate limited
Agents hit rate limits far more than chat apps because they make requests in the background — heartbeats, retries, and parallel tool calls — that quietly burn your per-minute provider budget. The fixes are reducing background load, configuring fallbacks, and using a provider without per-minute caps.
This is the #1 reason OpenClaw and Hermes agents stall. The durable fix is a provider whose limits don’t exist for you to hit.
Standard Compute is built for always-on agents: no per-minute cap for background activity to exhaust, automatic cross-provider failover (no manual fallbacks), graceful degradation instead of 429s, and prompt compaction to keep token load down — all at one flat price.
Because they generate requests on their own — heartbeats, retries, and tool calls — independent of user activity. That background traffic competes for the same per-minute budget and trips limits you’d never hit by hand.
It buys headroom, but a busy agent grows into the new ceiling. Removing the per-minute cap entirely (flat-rate, unlimited, with failover) is the durable fix.