Refresh token behavior across fourteen providers

OAuth token refresh behavior differs substantially across providers, making generic retry logic unreliable when integrations fail with errors such as invalid_grant. The comparison covers fourteen providers in fifteen configurations and emphasizes four operational questions: access-token lifetime, refresh-token rotation, grace periods for retries after a failed write, and inactive or administrative events that invalidate tokens. Many providers rotate refresh tokens, including Box, GitHub Apps, GitLab, Atlassian, Slack, Linear, Notion, and Sentry, meaning applications must persist the new token pair before making subsequent API calls or risk forcing customer reauthorization after a crash. Grace periods are uncommon and vary widely, with documented windows from Atlassian’s 10 minutes to Linear’s 30 minutes, while Box offers no recovery window and treats refresh tokens as strictly single-use. Non-rotating providers such as Google, Dropbox, and Asana present lower write-failure risk but still have provider-specific invalidation rules, including Google’s inactivity, password-change, token-cap, and session-policy conditions. Salesforce and Slack introduce configuration-dependent behavior, while expiry metadata itself is inconsistent across APIs, requiring applications to account for fields such as expires_in, expiresAt, or no published expiry at all. The text recommends provider-specific runbooks, serialized refresh operations, and commit-before-use token storage patterns, while presenting WorkOS Pipes as a managed alternative that stores refresh tokens and handles refresh, rotation, and concurrency across hundreds of providers.

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