GA4: Why are my Looker Studio dashboards broken?

Google recently announced it would be enforcing its GA4 API quota limits, so what does this mean in plain English?

Have you seen this warning?

On November 10th, the limit for the quotas of the Looker Studio (and in fact any other connector) using GA4 API came into force. This means that if you have previously built dashboards with multiple widgets connecting to your GA4 API, you may now get an error message starting data set config error. This does not mean your report is broken, it likely means you have 10 or more concurrent API calls or used 1.25K of tokens in the given hour.

Concurrent requests

• You are allowed a maximum of 10 API calls concurrently ( calls=piece of data – eg a graph)
• The number of calls being made at the same time to GA4 API, this includes if more than one person is refreshing the connector at a given time or if you have 10 or more calls in the page
• An API call includes all widgets and for graphs will include 2 API calls for the legend and the data itself

Tokens

• You are allowed 1250 token slots per hour, these reset every hour. There are also daily limits in place of 25K so you should avoid refreshing the data every hour too.
• When data is refreshed you will consume tokens, these…