What is the limit on Google Drive API usage?

Solution 1:

To view your allowed quota please create a project in the Google APIs Console. In the "Service" tab, the default quota allowed for each service is indicated.

Currently for the Drive API it reads "Courtesy limit: 1,000,000,000 queries/day". It's a per app quota.

After you've enabled the Drive API you can also set a per user rate limit (by default 1000 req per 100 sec) to prevent one user from depleting your app's quota. That's available in the "Quotas" tab.

There is also a link to request more quota in the "Quotas" tab in case you need more than the default 10M req/day such requests will go through a (light) manual review process.

Also files have per-files playback limit which depends on many factors (Is the file shared publicly or just to your domain/users? Is it a video? An audio file? etc...). These rules are not disclosed at this point unfortunately but for instance a publicly shared video can't be viewed by millions of anonymous sessions per day (use Youtube for that). Nor can an image be used on a high traffic website. Google Drive cannot be used as a Web scale CDN, it is scaled for personal content sharing (you share files with friends/work group/company).

Solution 2:

I'm getting a message saying "Sorry, you can't view or download this file at this time. Too many users have viewed or downloaded this file recently. Please try accessing the file again later. If the file you are trying to access is particularly large or is shared with many people, it may take up to 24 hours to be able to view or download the file. If you still can't access a file after 24 hours, contact your domain administrator."

so there IS a limit, just undocumented :e this is a file only i downloaded about 50 times in the last hour (testing some stuff)