One of the Control Tower features is the option to set custom request rate limits for your profile or devices, these rate limits are applied to a wide range of interactions within the platform and are based on your account's plan. There are two types of limits: hard and soft.
- Hard limits are fixed and apply to all accounts. They are based on your account's plan. You can read more here: Rate Limits,
- Soft limits are flexible and can be customized by you. They allow you to control the input and output of your profile and prevent it from going haywire and consuming too much input and/or output. You can set soft limits for your whole profile or individual devices. It is available once you activate the add-on.
For example, you can use soft limits to protect your devices from malfunctioning and using too much input or output, or to avoid a single device from sending too many requests and reaching the hard limit for requests of your account, which would block other devices from sending or receiving data for a whole minute.
You can apply soft rate limits to your whole profile, so that all devices in the profile follow them. You can also apply a soft limit to a specific device, which will override the profile limits, this can be useful when you need a certain device to have more or less limit than the others.

The hard limits take precedence over soft limits due to restrictions on the API level, You can't set a soft limit higher than the ones in the Rate Limits documentation.
For example: if the hard limit of your plan is 5,000 , even if the soft limit is set to 10,000 requests in a profile or a device, the limit will still be maintained in 5,000 requests per minute.
Setting soft limits on your Profile or devices
To customize the soft limits for a Profile, navigate to your Admin page, access the Profile page, and then proceed to the "More" tab.
For managing device soft limits, go to the Devices module, select the desired device, and similarly access the "More" tab.