🔌 My script keeps hitting a 429 on a free API, what do I change first

I work in Jeddah, and on weekends I help my brother with his mobile shop in Hyderabad from here. I wrote him a small Python script that checks supplier prices for about 500 items. The supplier has a free API. The plan allows 60 requests a minute, and I read that late. My script fires all 500 requests in a loop and gets a 429 error after about 60. First fix was a 1 second sleep between calls. That worked for about a day. Then my brother added 200 more items to the list and the 429 errors came back again. I also tried running the script at 3am Hyderabad time, thinking the server would be quiet. It didn't help at all. The limit is per minute, and it has nothing to do with traffic. Now I'm confused about what to try next. I've read about caching, queues and retries. Most prices only change once a day, so asking for them again every hour seems wasteful. But a queue feels like too much for a script that runs on 1 old laptop. I don't want to build something huge for a shop that has 2 employees and a tea flask. What would you do with 700 items and a 60 per minute limit? Cache first? Is retrying after a 429 safe, or does it make things worse? Does the server tell me how long to wait? I'm happy to read the documentation if you can point me at the right part of it. Real experience from someone who has done this before would help me most.

Cache first, since most prices only change once a day. That alone could cut your calls by a huge amount. Then keep your own limit under the real one, maybe 50 a minute, so you never touch the wall. For the 429 errors, wait and retry with a growing delay.