How We Use Upstash Workflow at ByDefault: Rate Limits, Retries and Durable AI Chats

ByDefault, an AI-search analytics and writing platform, uses Upstash Workflow to manage long-running, failure-prone jobs including daily prompt tracking across multiple AI assistants, public reports, content research, health monitoring, and durable writing-agent chats. When a customer submitted nearly 500 prompts simultaneously, the resulting API rate-limit errors and sandbox failures were largely resolved through Workflow’s flow control and automatic retries, which queue excess requests and retry failed calls after a fixed delay. The company configures separate parallelism or rate limits for each provider, explicitly returns HTTP 500 responses when otherwise-successful API responses contain only failed web searches, and uses workflow checkpoints plus Redis-backed streamed output to let AI chat sessions resume after crashes, timeouts, browser closures, or user pauses. To accommodate QStash’s 10,000-entry limit per workflow run, ByDefault splits large fan-out workloads into child workflows, while failure handlers send diagnostics to Discord and controlled polling limits unnecessary workflow steps.

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